Or: “Is Lieberman more conservative than McCain?”

Last night I set off quite the firestorm via a suggestion on one of RudyBlogger’s posts regarding the relative positions on the political spectrum of Joe Lieberman and John McCain.? My comment, which I probably should’ve clarified more effectively, was in response to what was in my view a correct assertion by RudyBlogger that in?a race involving Lieberman and a McCain-style Republican — say, Rep. Nancy Johnson — Lieberman would win the most Republican votes despite being far less conservative by any quantitative measure of political positions or voting records.? The result was a hearty debate?in the comments section, most of which questioned how anyone could call Joe-mentum the better conservative in such a contest (but, incidentally, none?of which argued RB was wrong about his prediction of a Lieberman victory in that sort of race).? As such, allow me to attempt to clear away the confusion, or perhaps create more of it, by describing the manner in which I see American politics currently aligning.

Read on.

First, let me?assure you, the reader, that Joe Lieberman is not more conservative than John McCain.? I know this because, as someone who values the empirical, I am quite aware of Sen. McCain’s lifetime ACU rating of 83, which, when contrasted with Joe’s own lifetime rating of 17, doesn’t leave much room for doubt in the race to the right.? Yet Lieberman seems to be eons more popular among actual Republicans than the Arizona senator, despite being at least as liberal on paper as McCain is conservative.? What gives?

Much of it is, of course, due simply to candidate-specific factors, such as McCain’s tendency to buck his own party’s voters and Lieberman’s apparent willingness to do the same.? And if that’s where the story ended, I wouldn’t be writing this post.? But that’s not the end.? It is, instead, seemingly part of a broader trend that seems to point to a reorganization of the political spectrum post-9/11.

Think about it this way.? Let’s say one was able to lay out a number of broad economic, social, and foreign policy positions and used them to create a two-dimensional political spectrum, from right to left.? Now let’s say one were to weigh each of those positions equally, apply them to any given national politician, and thus determine where each politician stands on the spectrum relative to every other pol.? This is basically what a scale like the ACU rating does.? And that’s the sort of measure that puts John McCain to the right of Zell Miller to the right of Joe Lieberman.? And yet is anyone willing to argue that McCain is the least popular of?the three?among Republicans?

The deficiency of this?exercise?lies in its inability to assign the issues varying weights, which is a horrible deficiency, because that’s what voters do all the time.? Voters’ candidate preferences cannot be fully understood absent adequate knowledge of the priority voters assign to each issue at any given time.? This, I believe, is the main reason for the McCain/Lieberman dynamic.? Republican voters, you see, have apparently decided that the issues on which Lieberman is conservative should be weighed far more heavily than those on which McCain can honestly tout conservatism.

So have voters reorganized their priorities since 9/11?? I would argue the evidence suggests they have.? The problem is, we don’t know enough at this point to quantify the precise nature of these changes.? We have a sample size of two elections since 9/11 to work with — a statistician’s nightmare.? In 2004, for example, we know that 51 percent of the country supported the aggregate of all that was Bush over the aggregate of all that was Kerry, but what we don’t know is which elements of brand Bush were central to his victory and which were incidental.? Put more simply, we know that 9/11 brought about realignment.? We know this because in 2004, a majority of Americans came together to elect a Republican president and a Republican Congress in the same election for the first time since 1952.? What we don’t know is the exact nature of this alignment.? All we have are clues.? And the more clues we get, the better we will be able to understand the current politics of the country.? That’s why 2006 will prove so illuminating.

What we do know is this.? We know that President Bush won over 90 percent of the Republican vote in 2004.? We know that Rudy Giuliani leads almost every single poll to succeed the president among Republicans.? We know that Condi Rice, when included in these polls, does nearly as well.? And we know that Joe Lieberman is the de facto Republican candidate in the Connecticut Senate race.? There is one quality-in-common of these four individuals that jumps out to the observer immediately, and that is that all four are serious and outspoken about executing an aggressive, relentless, victorious war against global Islamist terrorism.

Now, I’m not saying that right and left will henceforth be defined solely by a candidate’s commitment to Iraq?or?position on granting terrorists Geneva Convention rights.? What I am saying is that this issue, which wasn’t even on the radar screen prior to 9/11, has now become the most important issue in the political equation.? And that, by contrast, has made all the other issues less important.? What now has to be discerned is the importance of each domestic issue relative to terror.? And that can only be determined by, that’s right, observing more elections.

As I said, we’ll know much, much more after November 7th.? But as of now, we all have a feeling in our collective political gut that Republicans and conservatives for some reason prefer Joe “ACU 17″ Lieberman over John “ACU 83″ McCain.? The challenge as of now is to figure out just why that is, and what its broader implications are for the GOP, conservatism, and 2008.