After I huffed and puffed to the extent of several hundred words–was it Voltaire who closed a long letter with, ‘I lacked the time to be brief?’ which is, come to think of it, as lousy an excuse now as it was 225 years ago–a reader sent along an email that makes a perfectly pertinent point in just a couple of sentences:

Peter, Each of the items on Steyn’s list, via the campaign worker in a state Fred “lost”, consumes resources. The flip side of the proposition Steyn (and his emailer) tries to establish is that Fred is strategically deploying his assets to those states that will yield the most benefit. Why would Fred have sent direct mailers or bothered to have college campaign workers in New Hampshire and Michigan?

Why indeed?

Mark Steyn, take that.