We'll leave pivotal -- and watershed, seminal, sea change, groundbreaking, transformational, etc. -- to hype and history.
All we know is there IS a campaign, and attention must be paid. The question is how.
For depth, breadth and seriousness, nothing beats the political coverage of HuffPost.
Then there is Trail to the Chief.
Each week we will pre-ponder the ponderous and de-hype the hype. We will collect Data (Polling, Big and Meta), political science, research, media buzz and our own survey of conventional thinking (which we disdain and never propagate) -- and feed it all into artisanal algorithms devised by our team of Brooklyn-based quant-lumbersexuals, who do this work for us before band practice.
We will chart candidates and campaigns, flacks and fixers, pundits and the press, TV ads and position papers, donors and demographics. We'll talk about it on HuffPost Live each week at 12:20 p.m. EST.
We will take this process just as seriously as the candidates do. In fact, here is our firm promise to you: Should the candidates pull off the unlikely feat of staging a high-minded, responsible and substantive campaign, we will go away.
In the meantime, we will kid because we love. We love politics. We love democracy, even our flawed one. And, truth be told, we love presidential campaigns.
This week we set the stage by ranking leading contenders. Naturally, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush top the charts, if only for the allure of a race larded with more '90s nostalgia than a season of "Portlandia." In our TTTC Image Of The Week, we show you the logo for Jeb’s new PAC. He calls it "Right To Rise." But is it to rise ... from the dead? (Basically, yes.)
Ok, now here's our first list.
Candidate Photos: Getty, Associated Press
TTTC Image: Right to Rise logo via https://righttorisepac.org/, Day of the Dead poster via Imp Awards