Entry 6:

Hi Hanna,

You are dead right about the candidates' musical tastes: Buchanan all the way. I was surprised at how uniformly excellent their choices are (except George "Travis Tritt" Bush). McCain picks Sinatra; Gore goes with Bob Dylan and Ray Charles; Ralph Nader favors Leadbelly and Bruce Springsteen. Not a dog in the bunch.

The elegiac quality of today's McCain pre-mortem is amazing. They are the mourning sobs of besotted journalists. Particularly striking is Richard Cohen's funeral oration on the Washington Post Op-Ed page, comparing McCain to Robert Kennedy. Johnny, we hardly knew ye. This anticipatory sorrow about McCain puts the lie to an essay by Roger Rosenblatt on the back page of this week's Time. Rosenblatt argues that the United States used to celebrate noble losers such as Rocky, Holden Caulfield, and Robert E. Lee. Today, Rosenblatt claims, the loser is simply a loser, someone whose own mediocrity ensured that he couldn't make the money, land the girl, or win the war. The 2000 campaign, however, has been a celebration of the beautiful loser. As David Grann argues in the latest New Republic, McCain actually seems happier when he loses than when he wins. His campaign has been defined by a sense of joyful failure, and voters seem entranced by it. The more likely defeat has seemed, the more appealing McCain has become. Alan Keyes, too, has captured (some of) the public imagination with his hopeless but fervent cause.

The jaw-dropping New York Times story today is the front-pager about a whistle-blowing engineer who claims that defense contractor TRW fudged data on its proposed Star Wars missile-defense system. The engineer, who is now suing TRW, says that TRW's interceptor could distinguish an incoming missile from decoys only 5 to 15 percent of the time, compared with TRW's claim of 95 percent. She also says TRW rigged its tests so that its interceptor would appear to work. When she complained to her bosses that TRW was not reporting correct information to the government, TRW canned her. TRW, the story strongly implies, is using the bogus data to collect millions and millions in Star Wars defense contracts. Didn't you always suspect this?

The key question the TRW story hints at but does not answer is: Why have defense contractors had so much trouble trying to building a missile-defense system? The United States has spent untold billions on this since the mid-'80s, and there have been amazing advances in computer engineering during that time. Why do the experimental systems perform so miserably in tests? Why can't they build one that works? I would love to see some smart science reporter write a long article answering this.

Back to Super Tuesday for a moment. Thanks for your support on the exit poll fight. (The Post editorial page also weighed in on Slate's side yesterday.) My question is: Do you have the poll numbers yet? Do you know who is winning but can't say anything? Are you one of the exit poll teases?

D