The best thing about Obama winning, besides the obvious reasons that have been discussed at length, is how the entire republican party, the complete McCain campaign, and your average arrogant, swaggering and fanatic right-winger, like the ones you see in certain Fox News shows, contributed to the victory by waging an (uncharacteristically) stupid campaign against Obama and bringing up such blatantly contrived issues to try to beat Obama that it was almost hilarious.
There are many people (and issues, not to mention the candidate and his campaign’s competency) that ‘deserve’ credit for Obama’s victory but the one person I take most pleasure in pointing out and who set the course for the disastrous McCain campaign was none other than our ‘beloved’ Sean Hannity. He would probably still be kicking himself for that he, with his characteristic pompous look and arrogant smirk, announced a stunning revelation about Obama and his supposed ‘connection’ with ‘terrorist’ Bill Ayers. He proudly bandied the pretty predictable ‘Rovian’ strategy of manipulating information and decimating a candidate’s image by misleading information. Hannity could not control his joy at having dug up an issue that he imagined would rival the ‘swift boating’ and ‘weak on security French poodle’ sledgehammers that rove threw at Kerry. Little did he realize that the issue he brought up was informative at best but mostly hilarious to most people. I’m amazed that the veteran gop guys started jumping on that bandwagon like it was the gravy train and ran (sprinted) with the Ayers story as their leading attack. At least Rove had enough brains to know that if you want to ignite some ‘right wing foreign-policy fanaticism’ in people (2004 Bush voters mainly) then at least try to bring up a ‘foreign’ terrorist angle. The brain-dead Bush voters of 2004 don’t view domestic terrorists the same as a ‘Arabic Islamic Terrorist Rat’. The latter will ignite nativist flames of passion and hatred but somebody like Timothy McVeigh (or Bill Ayers) would ignite faint memories of an oridinary American ‘criminal’.
Of course, another underestimation that the GOP guys did was in assuming the Obama campaign to be the same as Kerry campaign which was the most clueless campaign ever. They didn’t realize that Axelrod and Plouffe had enough smarts to learn from the 2004 disaster and did not make the same mistake of playing dead when the other person attacks. Their responses to every attack attempt was brilliant and effective. Not to overlook their efforts or Obama’s brilliant efforts it still gives me some sweet solace to know that one factor in Obama’s victory was one person who least wanted him to become president – Sean Hannity.