One of the things I dislike most about the presidential primary campaign is the "electability" argument. (Here I am on the same topic four years ago.) Otherwise intelligent people choose which candidate to support based on which one they think is more "electable". The reasoning is, "I don't care who wins so long as it's a Democrat, so I just want to pick whichever Democrat has the best chance of beating the Republican." I've actually had people call me up and ask me for my opinion on which Democratic candidate is most electable. (But I've never had anyone call me up and ask my opinion on which candidate would make the best president.)

The electability argument offends me for so many reasons. For one thing, it's bad strategy. Among the factors that predict which party will win the presidential race, the "electability" of the candidates is a small one. To a large extent the candidate is going to be put in the same box no matter who it is. To the extent that electability does matter, it is mostly unknowable at the time of the primary, and to the extent that it is knowable, most voters get it wrong anyway. They get it wrong because they're only thinking about what scandals and issues are hot right now, or who has good name recognition or bad favorables now. Most voters and most pundits lack the imagination to foresee how the story will have changed four months from now. That's why we get such idiocies as people lobbying for Kerry in 2004 on grounds that he's the most electable candidate.

I always want to ask my partisan friends: Why exactly do you want to be sure that a Democrat wins? If it's because you think the Democrat would be a better president, then I ought to be able to infer from that you care how good a president we end up with. In that case, why don't you care to pick the best among the Democrats?

If you feel that Democrat A would be a better president than Democrat B, why do you assume others wouldn't feel the same? If you are arguing that B is more "electable", you're essentially saying that other voters are less capable judges of quality than you are.

What annoys me even more than voters choosing their candidate based on supposed electability, is when they promote their candidate on the same grounds. At the caucus I attended I heard a lot of Obama supporters argue that the reason to vote for Obama was he was more electable. (I heard the same thing about Kerry at the caucus in 2004.) What a stupid reason. If you want to win my vote, tell me why your guy is better, not why he's more electable.

I don't mean to pick on Democrats here. Republican voters go through the same ridiculous arguments. (And don't even get me started on the double stupidity of voting in the other party's primary in an attempt to elect the candidate you consider most defeatable.)

This year I've discovered a new reason to hate the electability argument. As electability continues to grow as a factor in voters' decisions, the candidates (and their strategists) have taken notice. Now, candidates in the primary don't just want to convince you that they would be the better president; they also want to convince you that they are the most electable candidate. And when campaigning turns negative, they don't just want to convince you that their opponent would be a worse president; they also want to convince you that their opponent would be a less electable candidate.

What's the logical next step? If the way to win the primary is to make voters believe your opponent is not electable, then surely one effective way of making them believe it is to actually make him less electable. Some would say that's already happening in the Clinton-Obama contest. I wouldn't go so far; I think they're still just challenging each other's credentials and credibility. Even so, it bothers me that the motive is there.

There is a simple cure for this disease. We as voters should simply stop voting based on perceived electability (which is probably wrong anyway).

For what it's worth, unlike most of my fellow Obama supporters, I don't believe that Obama is more electable than Clinton. I support Obama because I think he'd be the best president, not because I think he has a better chance of defeating McCain in the general election.

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