Recently, Andrew Sullivan compared Obama and McCain to Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote. Obama remains cool and lets his opponents self-destruct. Today, The Washington Monthly has a post that goes a long way toward confirming this pseudo-hypothesis. It seems that the McCain ticket, unsatisfied with the results of the Troopergate probe, decided to launch a different probe, spearheaded by Alaska's Personnel Board. The assumption was that the Personnel Board would play partisan politics, clear Palin of any wrongdoing, and "the new talking point would be, 'One investigation cleared Palin, one didn't, so let's just forget the whole thing.'" It turns out, this may backfire for the McCain camp:

[T]he board ended up hiring an aggressive Anchorage trial lawyer, Timothy Petumenos, as an independent counsel. McCain aides were chagrined to discover that Petumenos was a Democrat who had contributed to Palin's 2006 opponent for governor, Tony Knowles. Palin is now scheduled to be questioned next week, and the counsel's report could be released soon after. "We took a gamble when we went to the personnel board," said a McCain aide who asked not to be identified discussing strategy. While the McCain camp still insists Palin "has nothing to hide," it acknowledges a critical finding by Petumenos would be even harder to dismiss.

Oops.