The Jay Cost roundup

Cost's HorseRaceBlog, the best election blog out there, deserves regular reading (and summary here). Here's his latest.

In the past two days he's posted a take on the median-voter model of elections and critiqued it in a manner that explains why John McCain's campaign is in such trouble. He has two things to keep in mind in thinking about the model. First, the postulate that "the middle is where the votes are" is only the case when it is a two-candidate race. In a multi-candidate race, the middle is not where the votes are--you have to be ideologically distinctive to capture the most votes, and that's based on the positioning of the other candidates throughout the campaign. Second, the model assumes voters have perfect information, but this of course is not at all how real politics works. As Walter Lippmann's classic Public Opinion shows, politics is the art of gaining support by cultivating ambiguity. It's an art because too much ambiguity and you will loose support--either it looks like you have no backbone, or you loose the voters who want to vote for a known commodity. While McCain might have cultivated the former (as with President Bush's "I'm the decider providing strong leadership in a time of change" in 2004 when, as E.J. Dionne pointed out at the time, it was strong leadership without any mention of the substantive things he was deciding about) he has been beaten down by the latter.

This week Cost also had an analysis of the Democratic candidates in comparative perspective. He observes first of all that while the political climate favors Democrats, their top two candidates have some weaknesses that could be their downfall. He provides a new take on a point I made about Hillary's experience helping her beat Obama--it could hurt her in the general election. He writes:

Minimally, middle America is sick and tired of the current administration - and they want to change it. This always favors the party not in the White House. Unfortunately for the Democrats, I am not sure that Hillary Clinton, their front-running candidate, will really satisfy the public's appetite for change. She is not a change to the new. She is, rather, a change to the old. Will this satisfy the public? I honestly do not know.

Cost then makes an interesting point about ambition. Everyone sees Hillary as ambitious, while failing to make the same point about Obama. He points out that Obama has to be very ambitious to believe he could be President with so little experience. Yet the media have not picked up on this as a characterization of him. He chalks that up to political style. Perhaps. That's certainly an element. But as I've said, he's not yet the man, and has not yet really experienced the media glare, which is another factor besides style.

Cost then clarifies what he means about style, and makes the point that we have been so programmed to see the Clinton machine as just that, an artificial machine, that it is hard for us to accept her as genuine. He's really got his finger on something. That's the challenge for her campaign team ("HillaryLand")--to make her seem genuine. And they certainly know it. For Cost, Obama's challenge is terrorism. Will he make people feel safe? I don't know about this necessarily. War fatigue might be a much greater factor when the general election campaign rolls around next year than people feeling safe from terrorism.