GOP voters

Kevin Drum says:

I want to congratulate the rank-and-file voters of the Republican Party for their performance so far. Obviously I'm not planning to vote for any of the Republican candidates myself, but some are worse than others: Giuliani is a creepy one-note screwball; Huckabee is ignorant and proud of it; Thompson was a coma-inducing joke; and Tancredo, Hunter, and Paul were just vanity candidates. The two who are left, McCain and Romney, are by far the least offensive of the whole field. So: congratulations GOP. Considering what you had to work with, not a bad effort.

But are congratulations really in order? When I look at the data I see a GOP electorate that took a few swings and got lucky. I see Republicans who would like a swift withdrawal from Iraq supporting John McCain, and a base that can't seem to decide which, if any, of the candidates would be better suited to heal the economy than the others. I agree with Kevin that McCain and Romney are the least noxious in the field, but that's only because none of the GOP's less-famous candidates had anything like the pedigree that Joe Biden or a Chris Dodd or a BIll Richardson did on the Democratic side.