Those attempting to determine the Obama factor in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential sweepstakes have an easy road to travel.

It has puzzled some how Hillary Clinton, ordained by most of the mainstream media as being the winner before the initial competition in the form of the Iowa Caucuses occurred, based on numbers appears well on her way to being upset by Barack Obama, a recent Illinois state legislator who did not enter major national politics before being elected to the U.S. Senate just four short years ago.

Obama's meteoric rise is tied into amateurish blundering by a Clinton campaign that received such mainstream media boosting that important columnists and commentators interviewed sang Clinton's early debate performances and declared that she was winning them regularly and decisively.

A large legion of voters, many of them young and attuning themselves for the first time to the political process, refused to be conned into making a decision based on flimsy media propaganda.  For one thing, with enough candidates on stage to constitute a political "cattle call," how can any one candidate decisively win such joint appearance efforts?