I’m going to post an electoral map and some bean counting because I know this is one of Kyle’s favorite subjects and I am hoping to tempt him out of his quietude with a delicious helping of red and blue.

Chris Bowers at Open Left has crawled the recent polling data and — all appropriate qualifiers about people not tuned in yet and a lot can happen between now and then — compiled the current outcome of what he thinks is a strong Republican-weak Democrat match-up. In Clinton vs. Giuliani, Hillary Clinton wins 335 to 203. In Clinton vs. Romney it is a Hillary Clinton electoral landslide at 430 to 108.

As Mr. Bowers puts it (“Two General Election Maps,” 23 August 2007),

… it is important to keep in mind that Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani are the two frontrunners for the Republican nomination right now, and that Hillary Clinton is supposedly the least electable Democrat of the four early state candidates in double digits. To put it another way, this is supposedly the worst-case scenario for Democrats right now. On top of this, what do you think will happen to either Giuliani or Romney’s numbers when, for nine consecutive months next year (February 6th through Election Day), they are on every media possible, every day, arguing that we don’t need to withdraw any troops from Iraq?

Call me permanently bearish on the Democrats, but it is not only the Republicans who are going to have to endure nine consecutive months of media coverage. What’s going to happen over those nine months is that, nomination in hand, the Republican will tack back towards the center and dissemble and equivocate on the Iraq issue while the Democratic candidate offers elaborate justifications of policy positions, long-winded explanations on the difficulty of carrying out a withdrawal, et cetera until the average voter cannot tell the difference between the two policy positions. Meanwhile, as the above depicted outcome becomes more clearly fixed in the mind of the right-wing machine, they will be driven to ever greater acts of desperation. For instance just yesterday we were reminded that Democrats were at fault for the Cambodian genocide.