Dana was, to put it mildly, not pleased with the Obama campaign's decision to text their vice-presidential pick at 3:30 in the morning. Another friend of mine was furious that they kept ratcheting up the suspense and pushing back the deadline only to choose the candidate who'd been outed as the frontrunner the Wednesday before. Annoying though both decision might have been, I suspect they actually have fairly mundane explanations As meaningful as the VP selection is, it was not the most important event in the campaign this week. That prize goes to the revelation that John McCain is unable to remember his land holdings. After the McCain campaign ceaselessly hammered Obama for the past few cycles, the unexpected crystallization of a powerful narrative against McCain -- that he's an out-of-touch royalist -- was manna from heaven for the Obama campaign. They spent Thursday and Friday pounding that houses meme into the media. They held events in 16 states, had surrogates pushing the quote, released new ads almost hourly, and fanned out across the cable channels. It was the most vicious and effective full court press the Obama campaign had yet employed. And it worked. Today, the defining line of Biden's speech was his jab that McCain doesn't sit around the kitchen table worrying about the bills. He'd have to first "figure out which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at." Pay attention to the phrasing there: The Obama campaign was so effective at publicizing the seven houses line that two days later, Biden didn't have to repeat it. He could abstractly allude to it. Now imagine the counterfactual where Obama announces Biden as his running mate on Thursday: The "houses" quote is immediately lost to the memory hole as the media gears into full frenzy to cover the new running mate. It's possible that the Obama campaign wanted to announce on Thursday, but realized that if they missed this chance to capitalized on McCain's gaffe, they wouldn't give another. If so, that was a smart decision.
