Autopsy.

The argument I was making about McCain's loss implicitly in this chart and more explicitly in this entry is echoed by WaPo's Krauthammer today:   

In my previous life, I witnessed far more difficult postmortems. This one is easy. The patient was fatally stricken on Sept. 15 -- caught in the rubble when the roof fell in (at Lehman Brothers, according to the police report) -- although he did linger until his final, rather quiet demise on Nov. 4.  In the excitement and decisiveness of Barack Obama's victory, we forget that in the first weeks of September, John McCain was actually ahead. Then Lehman collapsed, and the financial system went off a cliff.

The column proceeds to point out the non-exogenous factors, ie the mistakes that McCain made:  suspending the campaign and the Palin pick.  Indeed, the chart supports that - note the uptick in Obama "shares" on September 26th.

Just something to consider as we are making conclusions about what Obama's victory says about the American spirit, American democracy, American dream or any other noble power people seem to be invoking these days.