Analyzing exit polls from last week’s New Hampshire primary, E.J. Dionne observes in today’s Washington Post that “an astonishing 42 percent of McCain’s voters disapproved of the Iraq war”

Maybe Bryan Caplan is onto something?

On a related note, Sen. McCain boasts of his fiscal conservatism, and one of his most reliable applause lines on the campaign trail comes from his strident criticism of wasteful government spending. His favorite example is the infamous “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska, one of thousands of earmarks tucked into the 2006 transportation bill. As McCain tells it, the bridge would have cost $233 million to build and would have served about 50 people. (David Boaz spelled out the gory details here. There were actually going to be two bridges costing a total of $454 million. In September 2007, Alaska officials dropped plans to build the bridge, but kept the money.)

To take nothing away from that particularly egregious misuse of taxpayer funds, it is worth noting that the war in Iraq is costing at least $10 billion a month, with some estimates placing the total costs closer to $12 or $13 billion. In other words, in one month’s time, we are spending the equivalent of 42 $233 million bridges. I doubt that we need that many bridges, and I’d much prefer that they be paid for by user-fees, but presumably some of these would go to somewhere?

The voters who oppose the Iraq war but who support the leading advocate for the war seem to be saying that fiscal conservatism stops at the water’s edge. Then again, it could just be cognitive dissonance.