IT'S ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU BELIEVE IN THE WISDOM OF CROWDS:

No surrender: The gnarled maverick outpolls his party and might even beat Barack Obama. But what sort of president would he be? (The Economist, 8/28/08)

But part of the credit for the way Mr McCain outperforms his party must go to Mr McCain himself.

For one thing, the senator from Arizona is a redoubtable campaigner. It is hard to name another politician who is such a mediocre public speaker, and yet so effective. His speechwriter, Mark Salter, prepares him elegant texts that he stumbles through like a man of homely tastes choking on nouvelle cuisine. His voice has no range; he stresses the wrong words. Yet people listen, because they think he means what he says.

He projects the blokeish persona of a man who used to drink too much, crash planes and chase women. On the campaign trail, he wolfs culturally significant junk food—“Pronto Pup” deep-fried hot dogs in Grand Haven, Michigan, or “concrete” frozen custard in St Louis, Missouri—with apparent relish. He has a stock of awful jokes, which he repeats so often that his staff have the punchlines printed on T-shirts. Unlike his more nuanced opponent, he couches straightforward convictions in simple terms. And he salts his message with earthy anecdotes and self-deprecating asides.

Mr McCain is at his best taking questions from unscreened voters, something most politicians seldom dare to do. He seems empathetic, albeit in a gruff, grandfatherly way; and crucially, unlike most politicians, he lets dissatisfied questioners ask follow-up questions until they run out of puff.

Even as bad a campaign as Senator Obama is running, he'd be smoking Mitt or Rudy--the Beltway choices--right now. Funny how the liberalization of the selection process has saddled Democrats with loser after loser but taken power away from the GOP insiders and the Eastern Establishment so that we nominate conservative winners from the Southwest

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 28, 2008 1:33 PM