And I don’t buy that there is a significant number of conservatives who are up in arms about this who weren’t already up in arms about the Obama presidency. In fact, part of what I was trying to say is that most of the people who are up in arms about gay marriage thought that Obama had already come out in favor of it–and therefore the announcement wasn’t actually news to them.

If a politician wanted to say “action X will likely embolden North Korea to act in such-and-such of way, which would be bad for American interests”; that would be a solid argument. But to simply assert, off hand, that emboldening one’s enemies is inherently bad for American interests is wrong.

But the bigger issue here is that you’re treating states as though they’re rational actors, which works great in game theoretic simulations, but hardly describes real world leaders. Real world leaders can be emotional, unstable, irrational, and in general human. They can get biased by sunk costs, entrapment, groupthink, or overconfidence. In the real world people are afraid to back down because they’ll lose face, even though the costs can be tremendous. Some people commit suicide to avoid the embarrassment of admitting failure, which is about as game theoretically non-strategic as one can get.

I don’t think Obama’s recent behavior will embolden North Korea, but at the same time, I think it’s even less plausible that North Korea is operating within the sort of strategic framework that you’ve mapped out.

Also, I doubt that the opposite is true: did people actually vote for McCain on the hopes that he would perish and allow Palin to become president? Again, I think the basic point that independent voters aren’t going to choose a candidate because they liked his VP pick still holds.

“but at the end of the day voters were voting for (or against) McCain, not Palin.”

I’m not sure I agree with you on this. I know a lot of people who were strongly considering voting for McCain but decided against it based on Palin as a VP – after all, McCain was no spring chicken, and the thought of Palin in the White House terrified a lot of people. I heard the phrase “one heart attack away from disaster” bandied about.