If you’re a Republican, chances are nine out of ten I can tell you what you believe. You believe McCain knows Iraq and Iran better than Obama; you believe McCain’s DC drop-in was sincere and/or clever; and you believe Sarah Palin is sharp, energizing, and pithy. You believe Barack Obama is arrogant, is wet behind the ears, has no talent but for speech delivery, and possesses no sense of the existential dangers we face.

You believe the MSM is practically campaigning for a Marxist who doesn’t believe the surge worked when it obviously has, and that it is unfairly hounding a great woman of promise and principle. America, being a center-right nation, won’t fail to elect Obama because he is black; they won’t elect him because he is a threat to stability in uncertain times. You read Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and Hugh Hewitt with delight and have fashioned a dartboard out of Keith Olbermann’s picture.

That was easy enough, though it’s just as easy with Democrats.

If you’re a Democrat, you believe that anybody who could possibly vote for John McCain is either a moron or a near-fascist. You believe that Sarah Palin is a threat not only to women who want reproductive rights, but to sleeping children and cute baby moose everywhere. You believe that Obama is a brilliant man, anti-war, and above the lowliness of Chicago or national electioneering. He should be elected both because he transcends race and because he’s half black. He understands the world as it is. You think that he could only lose because of deep-seated racism in America.

You believe the MSM is fundamentally committed to maintaining the corporate elite’s status quo and setting the parameters of argument. You believe the perceived liberal bias aids this by setting novel ideas that challenge the status quo beyond the pale of acceptable conversation (you have a friend who actually took the time to read Manufacturing Consent that told you so). You read E.J. Dionne, Andrew Sullivan (gay and pro-Obama balances out the conservative part), Bob Herbert and swoon, and made your Bill O’Reilly dartboard so long ago, it’s gotten lost somewhere underneath your collection of magazines bearing Obama’s stately portrait.

It’s all way too easy. It shouldn’t be.

The media majority

There are now about a billion books and articles one can read about how new media is destroying objectivity and critical thinking, but once you’ve done so, you can go to your computer, open up your favorite websites, and, to the exclusion of all those you routinely exclude, read all your favorite commentators. Those people have jobs and a name for one basic reason: they are suited to the new media environment.

Ideologues and fervent party-liners make Real Clear Politics ^[1] roundups a must-read every single day. Real Clear Politics provides the vital service of allowing us to see the best cross-section of what the national opinion-makers are saying. It isn’t their fault that the opinion-makers are who they are or operate the way they do.

The great advantage of a site like RCP is that you can see articles from The Nation and Mother Jones alongside those from National Review and the Weekly Standard. But it’s easy to sift through. An Obama supporter, opening RCP on Monday, September 29, can spot the headlines “Obama Holds His Own on Foreign Policy ^[2]” and “The Era of Obama Begins ^[3]” and go directly to those. Excluding “How McCain Wins ^[4]” and “McCain Controlled Agenda in First Debate ^[5]” is simple.

Whose fault is this? Is it the reader’s, for being selective in the way he or she builds a warm cocoon of affirming, non-threatening opinions? Or is it the fault of the opinion-makers for being so predictably and blindly partisan? This is a harder question to answer. Spending just one week reading every single article on RCP will yield the ability for any modestly intelligent person to do precisely what was done at the beginning of this piece: name the party lines, one by one, and the names of the people that extol them.

On the other hand, one need only perform the trusty “evidence against interest” test on any of the prominent talking heads in the information business to discover that almost no one ever passes. What are the chances that Norman Podhoretz at Commentary will be offering any honest appraisal of the strengths of Barack Obama and his campaign? About the same as the chances that Justin Raimondo of Anti-war.com ^[6] will be telling us what he thinks the Bush administration has done well during the last eight years. But that’s not their job, one might argue. Fair enough, but then whose job is it?

In the absence of meaningful choice between fact-obscuring partisanship and rigorous, insightful reporting — since the latter has almost ceased to exist — it would seem impossible to blame the public. One could argue that the media is just giving the public what it wants. But if that is so, then media outlets can be justifiably accused of putting profit ahead of truth and populism ahead of professionalism. If team sports sell better than hard facts, then the MSM — as an abstract aggregate of multiple partisan and nonpartisan entities which actually has no real political orientation — is complicit in helping to convert our democracy into a cyber-Hobbesian world of paranoia and animosity that has consequences in the real world.

It isn’t that we need no ideologues, no strong personalities with strong opinions who are savvy with the written word. We need people with convictions who understand that politics presupposes division. But also we need the ability to go to the daily headlines and find people who are willing to tell the plain truth for its own sake. Criticism of Obama from Obama supporters and of McCain from McCain supporters inevitably matters more.

Gray areas and minority reporting

Looking back over the above-mentioned party lines, consider the following. Barack Obama is a bigger hawk than McCain on Pakistan. In the debates, he said he wanted to “capture or kill Osama bin Laden and crush al-Qaeda” — harsher language than McCain ever used. And yet the “liberal” MSM continues to repeat things which suggest Obama is a dove on national security — a perception that, it is widely understood, hurts him at the polls with centrists and undecideds.

McCain stakes a large part of his campaign on the idea that the surge has worked, and the MSM, which conservatives would have us believe is campaigning for Obama, has so coalesced around this idea that Obama has been forced into admitting the same. Yet experts on Iraq like Peter Galbraith point out facts that would suggest that Obama’s stubbornness was not a flaw. In fact, the defeat of Sunni and Shiite extremists in Iraq has not left us with a fragile victory so much as a solidified crisis-in-waiting. The Sunni and Shiite majorities have defeated internal extremism — al-Qaeda and Sadrism, respectively — so they can now focus on the more pressing matter of vying for power.

The world is a nasty and complex place with no sympathy for those who seek cocoons. It also inevitably blows the cover of those who provide the silk for weaving them. Sarah Palin is likable and talented. She is also completely unfit for the vice presidency. Obama is untested, halting, and wet behind the ears — qualities that don’t recommend him to the highest office in America. His progress is also so substantial that in the course of one campaign he has gotten up to speed with those who have decades of experience. McCain is tested, fiery, and assertive — qualities that do recommend him for the presidency. His erratic moves and gambling warrior persona are also clearly becoming a liability. Obama may be another JFK, another Carter, Clinton, or Bush Sr.. McCain may be another Eisenhower or another Bush Jr..

Obama may be a conniving Chicago pol. But then, Obamaphiles and detractors alike might think about how the man from the Windy City might wheel and deal Ahmadinejad. Both sides want to have it both ways on this matter. Anti-Obama people want to say that he is both a neophyte idealist and a corrupt politics-as-usual sleazebucket. Pro-Obama folks want to say that he is both principled and tough. He might be principled and tough, an idealist who knows how to get dirty. It’s clear that he has learned not only how to bring people together, but how to influence people of influence. Recall it was David Brooks, an acolyte of Bill Buckley, who had his “leg tingle” moment while listening to Obama’s exegesis on Reinhold Niebuhr’s theory on the matter of using power even while it corrupts you.

McCain fans should be able to recognize that in DC a few weeks ago, McCain’s actions served the ends of partisanship and “Campaign First.” But Obama supporters seem to think this necessarily means that McCain was being selfish. It’s absolutely possible McCain felt he was doing the right thing. And for all the worry about McCain’s temper and bellicosity, it’s hard not to appreciate his warring spirit in a world filled with North Koreas and al-Qaedas.

If they lose

If Obama loses, it will be a combination of his policies, his campaign, and racism. But racism is too loaded a charge that doesn’t do enough work to explain what’s really going on. As the world is growing, people from China to Iraq are finding that comfort eludes them everywhere except in the more traditional forms of community: nation, religion, race, and family. If Americans vote against Obama’s Big Tent, it won’t mean Americans are stupid or fascistic. It will just mean that they’re responding to the world in a very average way. It will also be because John McCain is a likable person whom they know has sacrificed his own well-being in service of the nation.

If McCain loses, it will be because Americans are taking risks. If Obama is the next president of the United States, it won’t be because we are a land of fools consumed by the celebrity dynamics of American Idol or because we want a leader who won’t stand up to evil. It will be because more people wanted to roll the dice on a certain approach. Maybe some of that approach is new just because Obama is a Democrat. Maybe some is genuinely progressive and unprecedented. Maybe some of it is politics as usual. But they’re willing to suffer the consequences of being wrong. Fans of McCain’s gambling spirit and of the traditional value known as responsibility should appreciate that and stop acting as if the country is going to hell in a basket.

But all these nuances will be lost in tomorrow’s news roundups. The typical cheerleaders will chant their typical cheers and the best we’ll be able to do is read David Brooks, then Maureen Dowd, then Irwin Seltzer, then David Corn, and filter out what they don’t. The Great New Democracy of Information brings into focus the words of Eugene Debs: “When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.”

Now, tell me which blogs you read, and I’ll tell you whether you think quoting a deceased Marxist makes someone a blathering pinko or a resister of global capitalist imperialism.