To write the biography of a public figure who is not only still alive but, until tomorrow night at least, still very much in power, could be seen as either a quixotic folly or, given the inevitability of the new-and-improved post-election edition, which will presumably sell like hotcakes come Christmas, a stroke of marketing genius.

Wayne Errington and Peter Van Onselen's John Winston Howard, the biography that caused so much controversy earlier this year when exclusive extracts were published in Fairfax papers, was always going to walk a fine line between these two possibilities.

It was always going to be incomplete, amounting to little more than a progress report. Its conclusions were always going to be tentative. And, given the nature of this interminable year-long election campaign, it was always going to end on a cliff-hanger. Arguably, the most interesting stuff hadn't even happened yet.

And so, after poring over four hundred pages about J-Ho's treasurership in the 1970s, humiliating stint as Opposition Leader in the 1980s, triple-bypass comeback in the 1990s, and, of course, his generation-long prime ministership from 1996 to the present, one was left wanting by the book's final pages, which dealt with events so close to us in time and yet, somehow, not quite close enough.

In short, the book failed to answer the question on everybody's lips. We all wanna know, sings Tom Waits in the background as I write this sentence, how's it gonna end?

It is because of this question that, as we rush headlong towards polling day, John Howard remains the man to watch, the most interesting player in this not-quite-divine electoral comedy. Win or lose, this election will be the defining chapter in the Howard narrative. To the extent that everything comes down to this, Grandpa John has bet the farm, and his legacy, on a roll of the dice.

It was for this reason that when I was given the opportunity to travel with the news media on the campaign trail last week, I immediately chose to follow John Howard. For me, there was no contest, no question. Rudd may be the veritable king of novelty photo-ops, but John Howard, his whole career having led him to this point, remains the story.

The amount of ink that has been spilt on the matter remains evidence enough of this. Newshounds and political commentators alike know a good story when they see one. This piece is itself merely the latest in a seemingly limitless number of editorials, opinion pieces, analytical asides and satirical sketches that have focused on the question of what this election means for John Howard and his legacy.

These reams of words are evidence not only of the commentariat's acceptance of a Rudd Labor victory as a foregone conclusion, but also, given the comparative lack of articles focusing on what this would mean for Rudd or the country, the extent to which John Howard's story has captured their imaginations.

On the one hand, an electoral win would be Howard's crowning achievement, and his seat at the right hand of Sir Robert Menzies would be well and truly assured. Given the consistently bad opinion polls, a win on Saturday would be the kind of comeback usually reserved for Hollywood sporting movies featuring children and Emilio Estevez.

But a Labor victory would entail its own comeback as well: a record-breaking 16-seat comeback, the likes of which hasn't been seen in this country before. Whichever side wins, they will attempt to claim, as they have been doing all year, that theirs was a win for the underdog, the true believers.

No, what really separates the parties in terms of newsworthiness is what happens if they lose.

For where a Labor loss would be just that, another Labor loss (albeit a particularly disappointing, given their standing the polls), a Coalition loss would be the quote-unquote end of an era.

But there's more to it than this. In fact, there's more to it, also, than the impact that a loss might have on how we come to view Howard's prime ministership in the future. For not only will his legacy as Prime Minister come to be seen through the prism of the 2007 election, so indeed will his entire political career.

Viewed in the context of his thirty-years in the Parliament, what we are witnessing, I think, is the gradual descent of John Howard's career into the realm of Greek tragedy. Whether you support the man or not, you can't help but be fascinated by the trajectory his career has taken over the past twelve months.

It is as if the humiliation he faced as Opposition Leader in the 1980s is rising up from beneath to subsume him again, as if it was always bound to end this way, with loss and mortification. As if everything would be completely different had he not decided to turn his back on P-Co and contest the election himself.

As has been well-documented, Rudd has run his campaign much as Howard ran his in 1996 to oust Paul Keating, fashioning himself as a small-target and refusing to be wedged on cultural issues. Howard and his cohorts, by contrast, have adapted many of the poses that Keating assumed in the dying days of his own much-maligned government.

All this merely highlights the tragic and cyclical nature of the whole electoral edifice. Like bad fashion, government atrophy repeats itself.

More than anything else, then, what has made John Howard the story in this election is not so much the question of his legacy, but rather what we might identify as heavy dose of dramatic irony.

ElectionTracker, 23 November 2007