Start your engines: Will we have a better choice of drivers in 2012?

Campaigning and elections in the networked century

[quoted]

Estimates are that Barack Obama will initiate his 2012 re-election drive with a $1 billion war chest. The need to raise such massive funding to mount a credible campaign means candidates must likewise ramp up earlier and earlier in the election cycle, which in turn feeds on itself, especially in an era where professional consultants have supplanted unpaid volunteers. (Whitman spent $1 million to lure heavy hitter Mike Murphy before he did one thing for her campaign.)

The example of Brown, however, shows that a candidate can take advantage of the right circumstances to minimize wasteful excess and achieve better results with less money. Moreover, Sarah Palin’s rapid rise and fall in the 2008 election cycle highlights that a candidate need not even have widespread name recognition and immediate credibility because of a heavy resume to dominate an election for short–even critical– periods. Hence the conflicting vector of high-tech, high-dispersion information in the 21st century: if a candidate or a story about the candidate can exploit the viral vulnerabilities of new media, it will be much more effective–especially in terms of bang for buck–than any expensive TV ad.

That's what I said, too, same example of Thompson, but the day before. From my post (quoted):

The viral factor undermines the conventional assumption promoted especially by dinosaur media that the early start is, in fact, necessary. Foregoing the early campaign means a candidate will not have the big bank account–which will itself be a media story and indicate to mainstream eyes a quixotic campaign. Nevertheless, with the right hook (and a scrupulously self-vetted background) , the right candidate can wait until his or her opponents have bled themselves dry, other candidates have become tired and sickening to voters, and then spring into the fray.

This won’t work for someone like Rudolph Giuliani, who appeared to try a late-entry strategy in the 2008 GOP primaries, as he was not a surprise candidate at all. Nor did it work for Fred Thompson because he was unable to ignite any viral excitement and allowed the media to portray him as a lazy, stodgy joke. But it could very well work for a Palin-type other than Palin herself–who stands to gain little by a diffident strategy except to reinforce the notion of her unseriousness.

Stories about Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney as current front-runners for the GOP nod, therefore, are irrelevant.

[end quote]

I think it has to be someone who doesn't have a checkered past or even one big skeleton. And lots of innate charisma, especially a hook. And who can excite on the stump.

Palin as VP in 2008 had that initial effect, but her handlers botched the post-convention roll out, and the media did a hatchet job on her. But she had all the ingredients, including the hook of being a young (for politicians), conservative woman.