The attitude of today's Pavlovian Conservatives toward Senator McCain is reminiscent of the disdain that admirers of the late great Robert A. Taft, icon of American conservatism in his time, had for Dwight Eisenhower and his great failing: He was not only too popular (everybody liked Ike) but he was ideologically undependable, maybe even just plain un-ideological, hard as that is for a certain species of political junkie to imagine - about anyone.

Wait a minute, comes the cry from the uniform ranks of Conservative Spokespersons: John McCain is not popular with those voters who identify themselves as Conservative - whether of the moderately, very or wild-eyed variety. And they've got the Exit Polls, today's sacred scrolls, to prove it.

Yes, Virginia, there are still people in this world, or at least political commentators in this world, who have not yet seen through the polls despite their abysmal record in this election and lots of others going back to 1948, or even 1936. The kind of pollsters who splice and dice the American electorate by class, race, age, gender, tax bracket, ethnicity, years of schooling, color of hair and every other which way . . . and then announce how We the neatly categorized People are going to behave in the voting booth. With, of course, a margin of error of plus or minus 3 or 4 percent. (It's that numeroid at the end that gives their findings the perfect note of false authority.)

And when the voters don't confirm to the pollsters' predictions, it's obviously the voters who are mistaken. We've refused to follow orders. Just like John McCain. No wonder so many of us identify with him.

Here's the big problem - well, one of many big problems - with Conservative Spokesmen as opposed to mere conservatives: The anointed see the American voter as some kind of schematic drawing in a poli-sci textbook, a pie chart of instincts, preferences and predetermined choices - rather than that most unpredictable of species, human beings.

But as anybody who's had Biology 101, let alone Comparative Anatomy, might have observed: The actual, living specimen on the table never - never - is an exact replica of the oh-so-neat drawing in the book. It is so much more complicated, detailed, whole - alive.

There's something grotesque about the kind of analysts who think they can reduce real live human beings to just the sum of our parts. They miss the whole. Flannery O'Connor, whose very name brings a smile to memory, was once asked, as a representative Southern Author, another arbitrary category she despised, why Southern writers seem so fascinated by freaks. Because, she said, we in the South can still recognize a freak when we see one. And in order to do that, you have to have some idea of the whole man. And that's just what these oh-so-scientific pollsters, much like the Conservatives-by-the-numbers on the airwaves, seem to lack: an appreciation of the whole, independent, unpredictable, free American.

My louder and more rigid friends in the Great Mediarama out there are victims of the most basic of misperceptions about the nature of conservatism: They've confused right-winger with conservative, and Americans with some kind of herd they can round up, pen up, and speak for. They can no more do so than tell John McCain what to do. No wonder so many of us rather admire the man.

But these professional Conservatives are so provoked with John McCain for disagreeing with them on some issues - I'm not wild about some of his stands, either - that they'd be willing, in effect, to help elect a president from the other party with whom they disagree on almost everything.

Goodness. I like to think of myself as a conservative, too, but I try not to be a damfool.