Oh, yeah. There was another word I wanted to offer about the “median voter” intuition, the idea that only centrists, the kind of candidates willing to be ideologically flexible, win presidential elections.
The word is “bullshit.”
The thing that so many “centrists” identified with about Bush was the very thing that made him most ideological. They said: “The reason I’m voting for Bush is that he really stands for something, even if I don’t agree with a lot of what he stands for.”