I don’t expect a candidate to be able to control every thought and deed of their campaign members. I don’t think that candidate’s chief primary opponent has any control at all over people not in his campaign. And, I weigh all that against my love of the truth in journalism. Yet this seems like potentially much more than that.

If there’s anything particually eye-opening in the emails The Atlantic will be publishing, the timing of their release is not just about reporting. It’s also about creating and/or provoking disunity at the Democratic Convention. That could have the impact of penalizing Obama, when the source of the embarrassment isn’t even his.

That will come on top of the now-certain news that another candidate had an affair prior to the launch of this primary’s campaign. Some voters will be scandalized, of course, particularly since his wife has cancer. Together with The Atlantic story, it just heightens the possibilities of a Democratic Convention filled with uncertainty and inner turmoil.

Which McCain’s supporters will only be too happy to exploit.

Which is to say, it’ll now be on Obama’s shoulders to turn several lemons into lemonade to regain party unity and drive the focus back to the more important matters at hand, like the economy, Iraq, Russia at war and a sensible energy policy that doesn’t antagonize an already troubled base.

That’s a lot to handle. It’ll raise the old questions about Dems stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. Yet amid all that, whatever the polls temporarily reflect, none of it will matter a whit. Because these aren’t reflective of Obama at all. They may damage the political futures of other politicians. They’ll certainly make the rightist bloggers go all Church lady for a week or two.

But then when the conventions have passed in early September, they, along with the Democratic party, will awaken to the fact that the US economy is still broken, that the stonewalling coverup of the illegal and unethical actions of Nixon’s best mime still reeks of real, tangible corruptions and that the bad old oil corporations have invested heavily to own McCain’s soul.

So yeah, it could seem rocky for Obama for the next three weeks. But that’s when it’ll start dawning on the voting public that the flaws of the actual Democratic candidate are minuscule compared to the current president and every alternative in both parties. So despite the next round of teeth-gnashing, vitriol and chicken-little-ism, a month from now, the real campaign will begin to become apparent. The real issues impacting voters will start reflecting more and more in the polls.

Then voters will start looking at McCain and asking “is this all you’ve got?

And it is. He’s got a wing and a prayer and the dirty politics of Rove to rely on. Which is a whole lot less than what Americans will demand.