Obama's Successful Run and the Timing Aspects

Presidential candidates often prevail because they happen to arrive just as the country is ready to receive them. Sen. Barack Obama is such a candidate.

Sen. Obama, who now has secured the support needed to be the Democratic nominee, is an unconventional presidential contender, almost a revolutionary one. He also is a candidate who simply never could have been nominated before 2008. It was his luck, or his fate, to arrive just as a whole series of forces coalesced to afford him the chance to make history:

- Without the war in Iraq, there would have been no way to make his early mark - the one that first allowed him to distinguish himself from prohibitive favorite Sen. Hillary Clinton - by being the earliest and purest opponent of an increasingly unpopular conflict.

- Without the full flowering of the Internet, there would have been no way for him to marshal the financial wherewithal of almost 1.5 million citizens, who collectively made him the richest candidate in the race by far and turned the history of campaign fund raising on its head.

- Without the arrival of today's generation of new, young voters, who see a biracial candidate as nothing particularly out of the ordinary in the America they have grown up knowing, there wouldn't have been the same kind of historic outpouring of registrations and votes from newly minted Democrats under the age of 30. […] By GERALD F. SEIB, The Wall Street Journal