The Crossed Pond

Let’s not let me get too far out on the “McCain is the Republican nominee” thing. There is, after all, still an outside (though it is outside) chance that the anti-McCain forces rally behind Romney and cause enough trouble to throw the contest back into doubt. But for now, McCain is the presumptive nominee, and that’s a damn good place to be as January closes.

We will be—as with most conservative bloggers—picking apart the carcasses of the other campaigns soon enough, and taking what lessons we can from the McCain victory if it does get sealed. However, one thing worth reiterating, things that look obvious in retrospect rarely ever were. Also worth reiterating is that really, every century, only about 100 people ever manage to even break 1% in the race for the presidency, and it’s certainly not the 100 most qualified or best positioned necessarily. Any campaign that goes anywhere, to a huge degree, relies on luck and moment as much as anything, a strange concoction that can’t necessarily be predicated or depended on. We like to think, in the punditocrocy (or now, blogosphere), that everything has simple, rational explanations that can be picked through and seen clearly, but the truth is that it’s an impossible constellation of chance that tends to put candidacies over the top.

To that end, Ross Douthat has a must-read post on the massive amount of pure luck that’s carried McCain to where he is.

Of course, establishmentarianism helps quite a bit too. Let’s remember that, with Rudy, McCain has been the frontrunner for this race since basically January 2001. Were it not for his spectacular collapse for about six months over the summer, this wouldn’t even be a mild surprise. And, his status as “comeback kid” is not much more than Kerry’s was in the last contested primary (though Kerry managed to hold on to more money; of course, he also won more convincingly).

But, even there there’s a lesson.

The conventional wisdom isn’t usually worth much.

As is often the case (I reminded you in June), the guys polling in single digits in September (McCain, Huckabee, Romney) are now on top. And the guys that all the “momentum” and “viability” had coalesced around (Giuliani, Thompson), wound up as paper tigers who went precisely nowhere.

We’ll forget that by 2012, of course.