More crazy.
There is another case where a daughter of a high ranking military officer played a role in manipulating politicians. Jeri Ryan, the actress who played Seven-of-Nine on Star Trek: Voyager, married Illinois politician Jack Ryan and shortly thereafter when he ran against Barack Obama for a seat in that state, she suddenly accused him of all kinds sexual defiance and perversion costing him the race.
You are missing a bunch of facts in this story.
Ryan had divorced his wife in 1999, long before he deluded himself into thinking he was senate material. Both Jack AND Jeri opposed making their divorce records public. The media had to sue to get them.
The reason why they did was because in the Democratic Primary, the Chicago Machine pick for the office was a guy named Blair Hull. He was leading in the polls until people started looking into his divorce proceedings, and found a record of spousal abuse. After that his campaign collapsed.
It wasn't Obama who did in Ryan, it was Judy Barr Topinka, who wanted to run for governor and wanted to eliminate a possible rival for the GOP nomination.
Obama won that election which eventually springboarded him into the presidential race.
Yes, he did. But it had a lot more to do with the fact that he was the guy saying "Hey, wait a minute" on the Iraq War while Hillary, Biden, Edwards and Kerry were all writing Dubya a blank check. By 2008, Iraq had turned into a shit-show and he looked brilliant.
RINO McCain helped him with that, and later Mitt Romney helped him into his second term by pulling the same self-sabotaging tactics at the "bottom of the ninth" that McCain did. Obama was the most pre-Ordained president ever in history.
Or maybe they just weren't good candidates.
McCain's problem was that he was considered safe. The Evangelicals wouldn't support Romney because he was a Mormon and the Wall Street types wouldn't support Huckabee because he wasn't pro-business enough. So McCain was the comprimise candidate. The main reason why he lost was that he didn't have a plan to get us out of Iraq and Bush crashed the economy.
Romney, well, you guys all hate him now. You weren't that thrilled with him at the time.