Pop culture favorites for Halloween dress-up this year include Sarah Palin’s pregnant teenage daughter Bristol and her fiancé Levi Johnston, left, and members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that were caught up in the Texas polygamy controversy earlier this year, right.

AP / Paul Sancya

In the run-up to the 2004 election, couples dressing up for Halloween wanted to look like Britney Spears and her then-hubby Kevin Federline; rarely have Kangol hats and fishnets sold so well in October. This election year’s pair is the pregnant Bristol Palin and her fiancé Levi Johnston, the proud self-described redneck.

The pop culture parade that has long marked Halloween — the movie superheroes, the Hollywood icons, the pirates and the sexy nurses — has been supplanted by a raft of characters ripped from CNN headlines. It’s not just Sarah Palin and Barack Obama but such figures as the polygamist wives of Texas, the fallen New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and the bankrupt playboys of Wall Street.

In a sense, this stems from the entertainment industry’s failure to introduce stirring characters. (Yet another Batman? Yet another Paris Hilton reality show? That’s what we have to choose from?) But it would be near-impossible for anyone to compete with the most fascinating election cycle of our lifetimes. (Or, at least, the most fascinating election cycle of the lifetime of anyone contemplating a Bristol Palin get-up.) This Halloween season, politics has replaced television and sports and (thank you) fallen starlets as water-cooler conversation. It’s not as though we won’t see Madonna and Alex Rodriguez out there tomorrow, or Iron Men or deranged Jokers with makeup smeared into their hairline. But the creative types who angle to win costume contests will be trying to translate the absurdities, metaphors and talking points of the 24-hour news shows into an outfit that is not just understandable but singular. (A hockey mom is not going to cut it, folks.)

Four years ago, such high-achievers hit the party circuit outfitted as swing states. But no one needs to carry around a red-and-blue shaded map of Ohio when the possibilities for metaphor lie before us like a slop trough for, perhaps ... a pig wearing lipstick?

We haven’t even mentioned the supporting cast yet: Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tina Fey, Joe Lieberman, Katie Couric and the wildlife of Alaska, among many others.

And, all you costume pundits, how many Joe the Plumber outfits do you predict we’re going to see?