Last year, I linked to Tom Wolfe's In his Wall Street Journal profile, in which he discussed how out of touch most media elites are:

And so many of them are so caught up in this kind of metropolitan intellectual atmosphere that they simply don't go across the Hudson River. They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They're usually called blue states--they're not blue states, the states on the coast. They're parenthesis states--the entire country lies in between."

As a result, they simply can't understand President Bush's appeal to the majority of voters within those states:

George Bush's appeal, for Mr. Wolfe, was owing to his "great decisiveness and willingness to fight." But as to "this business of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush, I would say, now look, I voted for George Bush but so did 62,040,609 other Americans. Now what does that make them? Of course, they want to say--'Fools like you!' . . . But then they catch themselves, 'Wait a minute, I can't go around saying that the majority of the American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.' So they just kind of dodge that question.

While Wolfe's thesis was aimed primarily at the MSM, it holds true for much of academia as well. Sitting in for "conservative blogger" (as he'll forever be called in the MSM) Andrew Sullivan on a blog hosted by The Atlantic magazine, ordinarily sensible libertarian-ish law professor Stephen Bainbridge gets his snark up to write:

I live in California. Our population is over 37 million, representing 12% of the total US population. Indeed, if we were a separate country, our population would be larger than that of all but the 34 biggest countries in the world! We're responsible for 13% of US GDP. Indeed, if we were a separate country, we'd be the 7th largest economy in the world. We produce cutting edge technology, world class wine, and much of the nation's food crop. We ought to matter. And yet, we're virtually irrelevant to American politics other than as source of money that candidates then go spend in places like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

* * *

How is it that we persist in allowing these unrepresentative, yahoo infested, pissant states decide who gets to run for President?

I live in California, too. But I also know there are 48 other states out there, in-between the parentheses.

I'd like to think Bainbridge is kidding, and this is yet another example "Blurt and Retreat". And last I checked, there was a president not all that long ago in the scope of things who was once governor of California. Any second now, his name will come to me…

(Via Glenn Reynolds, who writes that Bainbridge's post is "not very nice. But I think the answer is, to piss off Californians and New Yorkers, something that the rest of the country agrees on . . . .")

Update: On the other hand, this is a criticism of Ames Straw Poll that's much tougher to argue with.

More: Lileks weighs in.