Since Glenn Milne lost his job as Peter Costello’s spokesman, he has been at a bit of a loose end. Given his pugilistic past, perhaps he could’ve hooked up with News Ltd colleague Caroline Overington and started a boxing school. Instead, he has persevered, in a world turned upside down, where Labor is in power and the erstwhile next Prime Minister of Australia is about to join Mac Bank.

Perhaps Glenn’s discombobulation accounts for his ridiculous column recently, in which he argued that Australian and US politics were now synchronised, and that the template for understanding US politics was to see Barack Obama as Kevin Rudd and Hillary Clinton as John Howard. Obama is presumably chuffed at the analogy, as would Bill Clinton in being compared to Janette Howard.

To be fair to Milne and his editors, though, perhaps they think that, to understand US politics, Telegraph readers need a facile comparison with something they might actually know about.

It’s also not a great deal clunkier than the other templates journalists and commentators have tried to impose on what is, this time around, an immensely chaotic US primary process. The mainstream media need for a narrative through which complex political events can be interpreted for mass consumption – so prominent during our own election campaign – is hard at work here.

The problem is, no narratives have worked – not the Clinton-as-unstoppable-frontrunner one, nor the casting of Barack Obama as the new JFK (or, lately, Martin Luther King – he should make up his mind which liberal icon he’s trying to channel), or the casting of first John McCain and then Rudy Guiliani as Republican certainty. Since New Hampshire, the Democrat race has increasingly been explained as race versus gender.

The dominance of the Clinton-Obama narrative has even skewed the contest itself – John “Mr 4%” Edwards has complained that they have sucked the oxygen out of his own campaign – in which case, one might observe, he shouldn’t have joined Obama in ganging up on Clinton in their debates. And the intriguing race on the Republican side is also being overshadowed, as a fractured Republican movement tries to overcome both the toxic legacy of Dubya and its own internal divisions.

But you’ll struggle to get a proper sense of this from the local coverage, which is primarily focussed on who has the precious “momentum”. Only Fairfax spinner Bruce Wolpe’s blog revels in the complexity, rather than trying to reduce it to simplistic analogies and racetrack clichés.

Problem is, the process will only get more complex from here. While it seems to have narrowed to a Clinton-Barack shootout for the Democrats, the Republicans still have a Melbourne Cup field in the race, with Rudy Guiliani lying in wait in Florida. And once the campaign goes national for 5 February, we’ll lose the comforting context of those little American states where wins and losses can be explained on local factors.

Anyone looking for a simple narrative will struggle. The likes of Glenn Milne should stick to the more straightforward stories of Australian politics.