The story doesn't need embellishing

(originally posted June 5, 2008)

How Obama Did It

How did he do it? How did Obama become the first Democratic insurgent in a generation or more to knock off the party's Establishment front runner?

This sentence above is part of the teaser Yahoo used to to get people to read the article, it is about 1/2 through it. They have lots of meaningless trivia and fill the story with lots of platitudes in order to make it a full length article.
This story is also engaging in the rewriting of history. In the last 26 years the Democrats have almost exclusively had candidates that knocked off the party's Establishment front runner.

1972: George McGovern (his nomination gave birth to the super-delegate system)

1976: Jimmy Carter

1984: Walter Mondale (in fairness there was no real favorite, it was a given loss)

1988: Mike Dukakis

1992: William Jefferson Clinton

and if you want to skip back you can include John F Kennedy in 1960.

None of these men were the party favorites prior to the primaries.

The AP hacks who wrote the story are just fawning over Obama needlessly and trying to look for reasons to do so. There is nothing spectacular about the Democrat candidate being the underdog prior to the election.