As Dean Barnett points out, the only people who had a worse summer than Barack Obama were the Obamaphiles and media pundits (okay, there is an big overlap between those two groups). The latter seemed to have misread utterly the candidates’ performances during the summer. While the Obama’s fans cooed and kvelled, the public slowly but surely seemed to have tired or soured on The One. Could Obama’s shortcomings (“preening narcissism, a fondness for platitudes, a tendency to whine and a potentially fatal lack of substance”) have gone undetected by the media mavens, while ordinary folks — those religion-clinging, gun-hugging, drilling-happy voters — caught on?

It is far too early to declare Obama-mania kaput. But the problem with emotion-laden, atmospheric, personality-driven campaigns is that once the magic ends, there isn’t much to fall back on. And worse, the sort of mass hysteria depends on a collective excitement: as Oprah so memorably put it, “he’s The One.” But The One can’t really be The One if John “Mean Old Not The One” McCain knocks him out in a debate and ties him in the polls, right?

We are on the verge of Obama’s VP announcement and a Democratic convention that will be cause for more media cooing. The good news for McCain: we have now established beyond any doubt that there is no correlation between media cooing and voter opinion. So the Obama team can enjoy the media cocoon. The voters will be waiting when the chanting dies down.