The 2008 presidential campaign has been like no other

When it started in spring 2006, America's voters worried most about the war in Iraq, consumer confidence had reached a four-year high and the Dow Jones industrial average bumped along comfortably above 11,000.

A former small-town mayor named Sarah Palin faced four others in a debate for governor of Alaska. The forum: Comfish, a fishing industry trade show in Kodiak, Alaska.

And Joe Biden made the first of three announcements. "At this moment," Biden said during a March tour of South Carolina, "I plan on running." That watershed would be followed, nine months later, by another announcement. Three weeks later, he was in.

It's been a campaign of halting starts and dazzling flameouts, of historic firsts and dispiriting sameness. Issues, like immigration, dominated and disappeared. Candidates strode in, poised to seize the spotlight, and slunk quietly from the stage.

Now the longest and costliest presidential campaign in American history, which delivered so little certainty and so much passion, promises a definitive end.

"I tuned out at the campaign's halfway mark, which was 23 months ago," quipped author Tom Wolfe. "How is Ron Paul doing?"

But for all those exhausted by the race, many more remained transfixed.

"Yes, there may have been more than the usual nonsense. But this is the way it's done in this country," said Richard Ben Cramer, who wrote an acclaimed history of the 1988 presidential campaign. "I don't think it's bad. It's just part of the show. And people are really, really paying attention."

Fits and starts

The campaign began so long ago, it's hard now to even recall the starting line. Iowans would tell you that, after the 2004 election, John Edwards never really left their state.

Yet most of the men and the one woman who would eventually seek the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations feinted and dodged about their intentions into 2006.

Biden made it official on Jan. 31, 2007. He would have been off and running, except he had to spend the day explaining what he meant when he said Barack Obama was "a mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean."

The senator from Delaware survived his gaffe, but others were done in by theirs.

George Allen's hopes ended at a rally in summer 2006 when, running for reelection to his U.S. Senate seat in Virginia, he made a lame attempt at a quip, calling a brown-skinned operative of his opponent "macaca."