The American Idol finale last night provided a ray of hope for the McCain campaign. How is that, you ask? Follow along with me on the most tortured political analogy of the decade. If. You. Dare!

Okay, so the Idol final pitted David Cook against David Archuleta. For non-Idol watchers, Cook is a 25-year-old (which is ancient in Idol years) semi-professional rocker who was making ends meet as a bartender. He's got a very interesting voice and a ton of stage presence. He's also in possession of some fine musicianship, with a good eye for arrangements and a taste for the sometimes off-beat.

His rival was David Archuleta, a 17-year-old high school student. Archuleta had none of Cook's musical background and no pretensions to being much more than a karaoke singer. But boy, was he a karaoke star. With a big, showy, Broadway voice and puppy-dog eyes, Archuleta never met a flourish he wouldn't murder. His song choices were entirely predictable--always geared toward pop standards. On Neil Diamond night, for instance, he sang "They're Coming to America." For his final song on Tuesday night, he brassed the heck out of John Lennon's "Imagine."

By any objective measure, Cook was the more deserving Idol. He was the more interesting singer and the more talented musician. Yet Archuleta-mania was running wild. The Idol judges continually lauded him as a prodigy. He was an early, and heavy, favorite to win in sports-books. (Cook was a 14-1 longshot.) And after the Tuesday night competition, Simon Cowell declared that he had scored a "knock-out" over Cook. Even the anecdotal evidence suggested that Archuleta was sweeping to victory: During the Wednesday night results broadcast, Idol had cameras in Cook and Archuleta's home towns. Cook had a crowd of a couple hundred people at a strip-center in Kansas City. Archuleta had a stadium of screaming, adoring fans at his Salt Lake high school.

For my own part, I was certain that Archuleta would win the competition. I do not, as a rule, place much faith in the wisdom of the great and good American people. Or at least not in their capacity to get snap-decisions right the first time around. I believed that Cook would, over the long-haul, have the more successful career in music, but that Archuleta would win the Idol vote.

But after two hours of in-program product placement and normal commercial breaks, Ryan Seacrest announced that--amazingly--Cook had won.

You don't need me to point out the obvious parallels, but I will anyway. Cook is a stand-in for John McCain--competent, old, an impeccable pedigree, and the obvious choice under any normal circumstances. Archuleta makes for a fair Obama--young, inexperienced, a one-trick-pony whose one trick is so sock-you-over-the-head dazzling that it makes people take leave of their senses. Archuleta and Obama are also darlings of the youth vote and the judges (or the media, in Obama's case).

Yet despite all that, the Idol audience chose Cook.

Why? Search me. I still can't believe it.

Is this entire parallel ridiculous? Oh yes. Entirely. Yet at the same time, I couldn't help thinking that David Cook's victory says something about the nature of phenomena, how they can be overstated, and how, if they don't have any serious underpinnings, they can dissipate, overnight.