Snowball effect: If he shows initial strength, more will jump on the bandwagon, if his initial success is minimal, he will fade quickly (except maybe in crazy Ca where anything goes).

Michele Obama is very popular with the voters that the Dems need to motivate. If she runs, she likely wins. It doesn’t matter what her experience is, it doesn’t matter what her interests are … It’s Barack 2.0 (or 3.0 if you’re skeptical that Joe is calling the shots)

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her husband, whatever else one might say about him, was a skilled politician.
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Disagree. Spam in a can. As for her, she’s not the least bit interested in the office, or, indeed, any sort of salaried employment.

Our best hope may be that RFK Jr. does to Biden what Ross Perot did to the elder Bush in 1992.
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If I recall survey research I’ve seen in re Perot voters, he was drawing about equally off the other candidates’ vote pools. He’d have had to have taken about 2/3 of his voters from Bush the Elder to have thrown the popular balloting to the degree he did.

What was distressing about the 1992 election was that a disappointing but not injurious president was tossed out of office in favor of the likes of Bilge Clinton. Bush was a combat veteran who had built his own business from scratch and hadn’t run for office until age 40. Clinton’s history of private sector employment was limited to p/t and seasonal wage jobs as a student and he received privileged treatment which allowed him to welsh on his ROTC service obligations. (Lots of presidential candidates haven’t had military service, but only two are proven to have have gamed the system to avoid service; Bernie Sanders is the other). His first run for public office was at age 28 and he’s never run for a p/t local office. Of the eight competitive candidates for president in 1992, he had the most atrocious character (and came with a ghastly wife to boot), yet he was the eventual winner.

Pretty good orator and ruthless enough to take out two opponents early in his career before he faced them at the ballot box. He demolished the Clinton machine in the 2008 primaries and managed the feat of being the first black elected to the oval office. As a politician I would rate him in Bill Clinton’s league.
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I’m going to wager that moles in the court system sent that material over the transom and he was spiteful enough to use it. Note, if the press had any integrity, they’d simply have refused to publish the content of the documentation and they’d have published the name of the person who gave it to them.

His campaign in 2008 was run by a Democratic operative named David Plouffe. He’d only faced a competitive campaign once before, and he’d been put in his place by Bobby Rush in that campaign. He didn’t ‘demolish the Clinton machine”. She actually had a slight advantage in popular votes by some counts and was only about 10% behind in pledged delegates. It was a preference cascade among the ‘superdelegates’ which put him over the top.

People who would have voted against him on race alone don’t vote Democratic anyway. That he was ‘the first black’ wasn’t much of an achievement (and his relationship to the domestic black population has been that he married into it; he did not grow up in it and his actual personal friends in the domestic black population have been quite atypical).

His opponent was facing incredible headwinds in 2008 and still did as well as Michael Dukakis in 1988.

If he were a politician in Clinton’s league, he’d have been able to cut deals with the opposition. He hardly met with his own caucus, much less the opposition. Steven Sailer noted that Obama liked to play golf, but he never played with professional peers. The man tends to avoid the company of accomplished people except when he feels he has to wheedle money out of them.

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I think you overestimate the extent to which he was ‘unknown’. I was living in Upstate New York at the time. The few people I knew who cut checks to the Democratic Party or carry petitions were behind him. He made megabucks off his books in 2004, though for all I know that was money laundering. Only partisan Democrats buy books like that.

You and Mrs. Krewer know Illinois politics, I don’t. I do know he had a patron in the legislature who put him on a key committee. It’s not a stretch to imagine that a court system employee on the patronage of some alderman could be tapped to deliver the goods or might just do so freelance if he liked the candidate. The question would be the degree to which the source could be traced. I recall in 2004 that the campaign of a congressional candidate in New York’s Southern Tier got hold of confidential paperwork on her Republican opponent’s divorce. I seem to recall that the archival source of the paperwork was identified but not the perpetrating clerk.

He had the usual tailwinds (the media), who get more partisan every year. McCain had some headwinds. (1) the usual voter fatigue when a political party seeks a 3d turn at the wheel; (2) the damage to the Republican brand from the mess in Iraq (2004-07); (3) economic anxiety; (4) ten major financial firms being revealed during the campaign to be insolvent and the attendant panic; (5) McCain hiring grifters to run his campaign. I think McCain would have lost to just about anyone, so I do not see race as a factor.

Romney wasn’t badly defeated. However, given Obama’s approval ratings in November 2011 and given how little bruised he was by the Republican primaries, one might have expected him to win. We discovered afterward that there was some sort of sabotage done to the campaign’s election day communications system, and that likely cost him some ballots among marginal voters. It’s also a reasonable wager there was a certain amount of absentee ballot fraud. We also know that the IRS was harassing the opposition. . What’s curious to me about 2012 is why more vigorous Republicans declined to run.