If the advocates of Ron Paul often seem like they're paranoid about the way he's overlooked in the mainstream media, there's good reason for it.

Check this piece in the Sunday New York Times Magazine on how potential Republican presidential nominees line up against President Obama.

The text claims that "Nate Silver models the likelihood of each candidate winning the popular vote based on 2012 G.D.P. growth, President Obama’s current approval rating and the ideology of the candidate."

Each candidate? The candidate who has been running third in many polls is conspicuously absent from the article.

Included instead are Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman, who are running at

at 3.5 and 1.5 percent respectively.

You might be able to make an argument that Huntsman could eventually emerge as the pick of the mainstream party leaders if Mitt Romney crashes. And it is indeed interesting to see how he lines up against Obama in Silver's analysis.

But Bachmann? She just a ditz who can't get utter a paragraph without the second sentence contradicting the first.

I suspect that the sole reason the Times and other liberal media outlets love to cite her as some sort of accepted leader among conservatives is to make fun of conservatives.

In fact few conservatives ever took Bachmann seriously even when she was doing well. She had a bit of a run as a populist, but that's over. So why is she among the five candidates arrayed against Obama?

And why isn't Paul?

I imagine this writer would say he left Paul out because Paul would have no chance against Obama in the general election because "his ideas are too extreme" or some such liberal mantra.

The polling data say otherwise. Go to this page at RealClear Politics and you will see that only Romney polls better against Obama than Paul.

This is not just biased journalism; it's bad journalism. The five candidates cited by Silver vary little in their beliefs. The reader learns nothing from assessing the prospects of five virtual clones.

Put Paul in there and some real differences might emerge. I'd expect he polls much better among the young, for example, and that's a key demographic the Republicans have to penetrate if they expect to have a future as a national party.

In the article that accompanies the poll, we learn more about Silver's reasons for picking those five.

Amazingly, when you get to Page 3 of the online version, you'll see he links to the exact same RealClear politics page to which I linked above. That's the one that shows Paul running second to only Romney in a potential race against Obama.

He notes how Romney fares but completely ignores the fact that Paul is running ahead of all of the candidates on which he focuses his piece.

On the following page, Silver then says something I agree with. Paul is the most conservative candidate in the race by a long shot. Silver's analysis of voting records and other data show Paul scoring an amazing 96 points on a 100-point scale of conservative values. Romney scores 49 and Hunstman is the most liberal at 40.

So Silver got that right. Paul is indeed the most conservative by any measure of conservative values.

But again that's even more evidence Paul should be among the five candidates considered. He included Huntsman, who barely registered in the polls, because he wanted to show how the most liberal candidate would fare against Obama. Yet he excludes the most conservative candidate in the field, even though he runs high in the polls. It's as if he wants to avoid dealing with the question of how a true conservative would fare against Obama.

And the answer is: Quite well compared to any of the more liberal candidates except Romney.

To sum it up, this is just further evidence of why liberals should not be analyzing races among conservatives.