Despite all of the questions that are being raised about the electability of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the reality is that the political fundamentals are heavily tilted in their favor. Yesterday, Bill Kristol reported that the McCain campaign realizes how difficult a task it faces:

Some conservatives are giddy at the thought — kidding themselves that the general election will therefore be easy, that Obama will be another Dukakis. I was struck, though, in several conversations this week with McCain campaign staffers and advisers that they’re pretty sober about the task ahead. About the Dukakis analogy, for example, one McCain aide said: If in 1988 Ronald Reagan had had a 30 percent job approval rating, and 80 percent of the voters had thought we were on the wrong track, Dukakis would have won.

And the McCain campaign knows the environment for Republicans remains toxic. They noticed that on Saturday night Republicans lost their second House seat in a special election in two months — this one in a district they had held since 1974 and that Bush had carried by almost 20 points in 2004.

Another McCain staffer called my attention to this finding in the latest Fox News poll: McCain led Obama in the straight match-up, 46 to 43. Voters were then asked to choose between two tickets, McCain-Romney vs. Obama-Clinton. Obama-Clinton won 47 to 41.

That reversal of a three-point McCain lead to a six-point deficit for the McCain ticket suggests what might happen (a) when the Democrats unite, and (b) if McCain were to choose a conventional running mate, who, as it were, reinforced the Republican brand for the ticket. As the McCain aide put it, this is what will happen if we run a traditional campaign; our numbers will gradually regress toward the (losing) generic Republican number.

Kristol then mentions talk within the McCain camp about choosing the young Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal as a vice presidential nominee. But that’s unlikely to make much difference. The problem for McCain is that he is likely to regress toward the Republican number no matter what he does.The reality is that presidential elections are highly predictable. Candidates probably only matter on the margin. This empirical reality is often inverted in journalism, which typically attributes results driven by the fundamentals to the candidates’ political skill (or the lack thereof). As a result, McCain’s likely failure will be interpreted as the result of some tactical mistake (my prediction: the loss of his “maverick” luster) rather than the result of an unfavorable political environment.