The lede of Charles Krauthammer’s latest:

Last week I made the open-and-shut case for John McCain: In a dangerous world entering an era of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation, the choice between the most prepared foreign policy candidate in memory vs. a novice with zero experience and the wobbliest one-world instincts is not a close call.

I find this pretty striking. The case for McCain is that the previous eight years of conservative national security policy have worked so badly that we can ill-afford to abandon them. The world is dangerous! We’re facing uncontrolled nuclear proliferation! Clearly, says Krauthammer, you can’t change horses amidst a stream like that. But whose fault is it that the world is so dangerous? Whose fault is it that we’re facing uncontrolled nuclear proliferation? Could it be that when conservative governance keeps making things more and more dangerous, that the right option is to stop having conservative governance?

Mitch McConnell is not what you’d call a sympathetic character, but if someone was doing this to a politician I admire I’d be up in arms, and it’s really no better when aimed at a politician I don’t like.

Google’s election maps gallery allows us to understand the folly of Republicans writing off Northern Virginia as “fake.” Take a look at the Bush-Kerry results in the region:

As you can see, Bush actually carried the two outer suburban counties Loudon and Prince William. And though Fairfax County ultimately went for Kerry, it was by a reasonably close 53-46 margin. Since this is also Virginia’s biggest county in terms of population, the difference between winning 46 percent and winning 43 percent is pretty significant. And it doesn’t help your case to dismiss it out of hand as alien territory.

Meanwhile, the demographic breakdown is interesting:

A well-to-do suburban county ought to be decent territory for the GOP. But note that along with an about average number of African-Americans and Hispanics, Fairfax has a large Asian population. Consequently, the white plurality is a smaller white plurality than you see nationwide. And consequently, the Republicans lose. That, however, is the general direction in which the United States is heading — slowly but surely growing a little less white and therefore a little less Republican.

2010 Arizona Senate trial heat Napolitano 53%, McCain 45%. Early polling has little value, but this kind of early weakness is the hallmark of a beatable candidate. Of course my assumption is that McCain won’t actually be running for re-election.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

Anyway,  there’s been a pretty lively debate raging between Yglesias, Douthat, Judis and Feeny. It’ll probably come as no surprise that I mostly agree with Douthat, if with a significant twist. It’s not that I put it past McCain’s people to race-bait, it’s that I really don’t care.

I think I should revise and extend my remarks on this score. “Race-baiting,” however defined, is not really the issue. Indeed, I tend to think that as a political concept it’s overblown. Barack Obama is a black man. This is obvious. People inclined to let this fact influence their vote — either those drawn to him or those repelled from him on account of his race — probably don’t need to be prompted or baited into doing so. The more important point is that race and racism have a large structural pull on the shape of American politics. In particular, they’re an obstacle for a politics of economic equality, security, and solidarity.

This happens through a number of mechanisms. One is that you have white Americans near the bottom of the economic spectrum who may be more inclined to identify on a personal level with whites near the top of the pyramid than with non-whites who are more similarly situated in terms of objective interests. Recall the great Gelman race/class master charts:

Poor Hispanics, poor Asians, poor African-Americans, and poor “others” are all very disinclined to vote Republican. But about half of poor non-Hispanic whites do. Conversely, very few rich African-Americans vote Republican, notwithstanding the general pro-GOP sympathies of rich non-Republicans. I don’t think anyone would take me to be saying anything especially controversial if I were to say that rich blacks’ aversion to the Republican Party is, in part, a matter of racial solidarity with the mostly non-rich black population trumping class solidarity with the mostly non-black rich population. But the same is true on the flip side — white racial solidarity trumping class solidarity is one of the reasons that poor whites are so relatively friendly to the Republican Party.

Another mechanism has to do with trust. Once upon a time there was a lot of concern with “welfare fraud.” Welfare fraud was a real phenomenon. And, clearly, being against fraud is not a racist sentiment as such. At the same time, children suffering lifelong handicaps in the struggle to build a decent life for themselves owing to growing up in conditions of deplorable poverty also was (and is) a very real problem. And when designing systems, it’s difficult to maximize the value of “giving all the help needed to everyone who needs it” and also maximize the value of making the system completely immune to fraud or abuse. When the recipients of help are people you find it easy to identify with, the tendency is to tell yourself sympathetic stories about their plight. When the recipients of help are people you find it difficult to identify with, you become much more skeptical — very eager to make sure that not one red cent is spent on an idler or a fraudster. Doing that becomes the most important thing, and that means that more legitimate needs wind up going unmet. And, again, it’s not racist to decide that you’re more interested in preventing fraud than in providing people with preventive health care — that’s a value decision. But it does seem that which values people prefer depends in part on racial and ethnic factors.

It’s not a coincidence that you tend to see more generous welfare states constructed in countries that have traditionally been homogeneous, or that in the US the South has both been the epicenter of racial animosity and the location of the least generous welfare states. One could arguably tell a story in which it’s the Swedes and the Finns who are the real racists here (letting Nordic genetic superiority blind them to the overarching merits of sink-or-swim individualism) but either way you’re going to get the result that racial and ethnic conflict is relevant to the politics of class and economics.

Official McCain campaign memo:

Ohio and Pennsylvania – Everyone knows that vote rich Ohio and Pennsylvania will be key battlegrounds for this election. Between the two: 41 electoral votes and no candidate has gotten to the White House without Ohio. Senator McCain and Governor Palin have been campaigning non-stop in these key battleground states and tonight Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has pumped up our campaign at a rally in Columbus. Our position in these states is strong and undecided voters continue to have a very favorable impression of our candidate.

JFK lost Ohio in 1960, FDR lost Ohio in 1944, Grover Cleveland lost Ohio in 1892. The Ohio trivia fact is that no Republican has ever taken the White House without Ohio.

At the moment, the Pollster.com average gives Obama a 6.3 percentage point lead in Ohio. But even if McCain were to gain 6.5 percentage points on Obama in every state, thus carrying Ohio, he’d still be losing in all the Kerry states plus Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, and Virginia and thus lose the election.