This week, Barack Obama ran a half hour ad right before Game 5, Part II of the World Series of American Heterosexual Baseball. The going whisper campaign was that Obama pushed back the start of the third of a game to air his presumptuous ad, and that Real Americans would be bitterly, clingily angry at his great affront to a playoff series none of them were watching.
In 2000 and 2004, this would have been the defining narrative of the last two weeks, not McCain's William the Hung or a tape concerning an obscure Columbia professor's 2003 dinner. Obama not understanding the real priorities of American, of having the utter audacity and presumptuousness to think that a glorified infomercial was enough to push the American pastime out of the way.
Yet, somehow, it wasn't. It bubbled up once or twice, and went nowhere. Part of this was probably public disinterest in the game, part of this was probably the fact that the McCain campaign could run against a child molester and make their campaign message about whether or not the guy actually bought the weed he smoked in eleventh grade.
But another part of this is the fact that Obama is simply that good of a campaigner. He nullified the "regular guy" meme months ago, shook up the same frame that's worked since Nixon was running, and did it while running as a black guy with a funny name. It's why I don't worry about the race closing, or even about close-race shenaningans on Tuesday. I just feel like he's got this covered...and it's why I'm more confident than ever that he'll be a good, possibly great president.
It also helps that John McCain is wandering around making jokes about 1930s Russia and bear DNA, the crushing issues of the day. Never let that man's incomptence be understated.
