You've done all any outsider can do in this situation, and done it well.  Speculation can be such fun but I pine for the insider info!

nanne:

But maybe she's just a better actress.

My guess is tat we have no idea just how good she is, and how good Obama is at being a white screen on which almost anyone can project their favourite fantasies and imagine they are seeing the real deal (i.e. their aspirations in a mirror).

Both qualities are the essence of mass politics and both are supremely good at it.  Therefore I caution against imagining that what we are doing here is anything more than analyzing the projected images manufactured by their respective handlers.

I am reminded of the firm "The Candidate" in which a young Robert Redford plays a handsome young upstart idealist who overthrows the party machine and wins a Senate seat.  Having been elected he asks, In the final sequence,  almost for the first time since his long lost idealistic days "what do we do now?".  He is beholden to the machine that elected him, but the process of winning the seat had become an end in itself, and he had long lost the and sold out on the idealism that had led him to politics in the first place.

Index of Frank's Diaries