The only thing I disagree with this easy is that it, I believe, overlooks the emotional — non rational — appeal of Obama. People may know better than to vote for Obama but they'll do it anyway, and it is NOT about conforming in the sense of the two ways mentioned in this essay. The essay assumes that people are rational and that rationality wins out in the privacy of the voting booth. I submit that emotions are the easiest and first things, therefore, they inform the first choice for voters. It is hard to reason, and once we reason it is easy to doubt and go against our reasoning. For our efforts, we are never sure with reason's outcomes. Emotions, on the other hand, feel close, natural and reflect more about who we are, our very personal choice — the “politics is personal” POV. Mind you, we have been trained to feel and media does a a lot of this training, so you can question how “personal” any of it really is. But to the average voter it feels personal, even though their feeling and opinions have been shaped.
Bottom line: people are irrational and do things even thought they may know better. Examples everywhere from Plato's Republic to smoking cigarettes.
All psychological research indicates that emotional responses determine the overwhelming majority of human behaviour: reason exists only to facilitate achieving the desired a priori outcome, which, in politics, includes post-facto justification to peers.