There's a clever line in the musical Pippin, "It's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart." And it looks to me as if Obama has been both smart and lucky.
There's one important factor, a deep structural one, that's been undermining the McCain campaign from the outset, and the Palin pick is only a facet of it: the Republican party is currently deeply fractured. In order to secure the nomination, the candidate has to be acceptable to Religionist Right, which eliminated several of the other candidates: Giuliani (mayor of librul hommasexshul elite New York), Romney (LDS is not considered actually "Christian"), etc.
[Note: Although I don't understand exactly why Huckabee wasn't able to do better with this base and get a jump on McCain in the early stages.]
This filters out candidates who might be more appealing to the other sections of the GOP: fiscal conservatives, old-fashioned actual philosophical big-C Conservatives, banking interests. So whoever wins the primary then needs to tack to re-engage with those other factions. But McCain, or his strategists, were concerned with the lack of enthusiasm in the social-conservative base -- hence the Palin pick.
Obama's good luck was McCain's failure to properly vet Palin, or to accurately judge how she would be received by the rest of the GOP and the electorate's undecided middle. But it was the current fracturing of the GOP that both got the nomination for McCain and pushed him to pick someone like Palin.
So count the factionalism in the now-disintegrating GOP as a lucky break for Obama. And tick off the big financial implosion, coming on the heels of McCain's "fundamentals of the economy" remark as another lucky break. And ring up Palin's spectacular inability to provide any assurance whatsoever to most folks that she'd be even a semi-adequate VP.
Question: in those various ancient Japanese war treatises that everyone was reading a few years ago, wasn't there something about a good commander finding ways to make genius and good planning look like a series of "lucky breaks"?
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There's one important factor, a deep structural one, that's been undermining the McCain campaign from the outset, and the Palin pick is only a facet of it: the Republican party is currently deeply fractured. In order to secure the nomination, the candidate has to be acceptable to Religionist Right, which eliminated several of the other candidates: Giuliani (mayor of librul hommasexshul elite New York), Romney (LDS is not considered actually "Christian"), etc.
[Note: Although I don't understand exactly why Huckabee wasn't able to do better with this base and get a jump on McCain in the early stages.]
This filters out candidates who might be more appealing to the other sections of the GOP: fiscal conservatives, old-fashioned actual philosophical big-C Conservatives, banking interests. So whoever wins the primary then needs to tack to re-engage with those other factions. But McCain, or his strategists, were concerned with the lack of enthusiasm in the social-conservative base -- hence the Palin pick.
Obama's good luck was McCain's failure to properly vet Palin, or to accurately judge how she would be received by the rest of the GOP and the electorate's undecided middle. But it was the current fracturing of the GOP that both got the nomination for McCain and pushed him to pick someone like Palin.
So count the factionalism in the now-disintegrating GOP as a lucky break for Obama. And tick off the big financial implosion, coming on the heels of McCain's "fundamentals of the economy" remark as another lucky break. And ring up Palin's spectacular inability to provide any assurance whatsoever to most folks that she'd be even a semi-adequate VP.
Question: in those various ancient Japanese war treatises that everyone was reading a few years ago, wasn't there something about a good commander finding ways to make genius and good planning look like a series of "lucky breaks"?