Calm Down, Everyone...

I know George Will planted a big sloppy grandma kiss on Barack yesterday, which leaves Pat Buchanan as the only remaining pundit to the right of Chris Matthews to not get all goochie-goo about a liberal Democrat from Chicago. But let's not get carried away just yet. In 1960 JFK only just barely beat a famously sweaty, balding Richard Milhous Nixon, though no one had 42" HD televisions back then. Not to mention that poor old dead Hillary actually managed to get a pretty decent slice of the vote in Iowa, and is still polling at or above 30% in Cow Hampshire.

If charisma, or to be more precise, media coverage of charisma, equated directly to votes, John Edwards would already be running for vice president again and Hillary Clinton would have committed seppuku or at the very least had someone shank Norman Hsu. Upset victories like Obama's Iowa win are less of a victory of Obama over Hillary than they are of Obama over the media's narrative of the race, which is written largely from a rear-view mirror. When it comes to politics, most people take the approach I take with sports, which is to wait until the playoffs to pay attention.  ¶ 8:29 AM