Much ado....

I enjoy reading Jay Cost's commentaries at RealClearPolitics but he increasingly seems to take up large amounts of e-paper to disprove and correct where no practical need exists. Like the Princess and the pea, Jay is made uncomfortable by tiny grains of perceived inaccuracy and driven nigh to madness by improperly nuanced argument.

His latest tirade (and you should read it before continuing here) is aimed at that amorphous meanie Conventional Wisdom and his sister Many Pundits. As neither CW or MP have anyone with a vested interest in rushing to thier defense, they make inviting targets for anyone wishing to trash a straw man or woman.

In this case, Jay is unhappy with the perception that John McCain’s presidential campaign is in trouble because McCain is too moderate for the Republican Party. As is increasingly the case Jay doesn’t argue with the basic notion (that McCain is in trouble), or even with specifics (McCain is in trouble because he is too moderate), but rather with the precise block by block reasoning of the notion taker.

Let us say, for instance, that you awake and upon seeing bright light declare that day has come and the sun is shining. Jay will immediately "TUT TUT" and point out that you have improperly laid the factual groundwork for your statement. After all, someone COULD be shining a flashlight in your eyes.

Jay goes through a torturous explanation of such things as the "median voter theorem" , "single-peaked preferences" , "the Nash equilibrium" and various assorted other examples of geek speak that is of limited utility beyond a college classroom.

At the bottom of it all is the thrilling nugget that a 2 man race is different from a 3 man race (or 4,5, or 25). No fooling Jay?

The point he labors for so mightily is that under certain circumstances (none of which he argues is present in the current race for the GOP nomination) some one COULD win while being to the left of the party's base.

Let’s assume that there were three candidates, "A", "B", & "C", and 99 voters spread out precisely evenly across the expanse of GOP ideology, with 1 being far left and 99 being far right. Now let us assume that "B" and "C" both chose to perch on, oh lets say 51. Then let us say that "A" perched on 40. Under this utterly goofy scenario, "A" would win because he would get roughly 45 votes while "B" & "C" would each get about 27 votes.

Why is that scenario "goofy"? Because no group of voters of any party, religion, ethnicity, culture, tradition, age, or other known category, are evenly dispersed across the entire spectrum of opinion. In the case of the GOP, McCain has vastly annoyed something on the order of 90% of the party. Therefore he starts out at about 10 instead of at 40 like "A" does above, AND, the rest of the candidates are not clumped together at point 51 as "B" & "C" are above, but strung out from about 20 to 90.

McCain has ticked off the ultraconservatives with his support for "campaign finance reform", the recent immigration bill, and for various and sundry snarky comments over the past 7 years. He is now anathema to the few "liberal" Republicans there are, by his strong support for the Iraq War/Police Action. Ditto for any Independents who might vote in a GOP primary.

To support McCain at this point requires you to support:
A) McCain -Feingold
B) 2007 Immigration Bill
C) Iraq War/Police Action
And further, one must be unconcerned about electing a 72 year old cancer survivor with a bad temper.

Thus at the end of the day Jay Cost has his nose disjointed about nothing.

McCain IS losing in great part because he is so far removed from the median voter in today’s Republican Party. I think he also has other flaws that make him unlikely to win the nomination under any circumstances, but by starting out so far to the extreme he is clearly doomed.

As I said here last November, McCain 2000 was a creation of the media, and what the media creates.....