Americans who watched last night’s debate, including independent and undecided voters, concluded by an overwhelming margin that Obama decisively won. Viewers of Fox News, as Glenn Greenwald notes, beheld a different reality, a wholly different debate. For these fair and balanced viewers, by a margin of seventy percentage points (86-12%), McCain utterly crushed Obama. These Fox Watchers must be ecstatic about the victory of their candidate. They must believe that McCain did such an effective job of making his case to the American people that the population will now overwhelmingly vote Republican in November. Right.
Not everyone on the right is so sanguine, of course. Andy McCarthy writes that:
We have a disaster here — which is what you should expect when you delegate a non-conservative to make the conservative (nay, the American) case. We can parse it eight ways to Sunday, but I think the commentary is missing the big picture.
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Memo to McCain Campaign: Someone is either a terrorist sympathizer or he isn’t; someone is either disqualified as a terrorist sympathizer or he’s qualified for public office. You helped portray Obama as a clealy [sic] qualified presidential candidate who would fight terrorists.
I have to admit I don’t really understand the parallel reality many conservative extremists live in. Ian, who listens to a lot more right-wing radio than I do, may have insights here… but c’mon people. How can anyone, regardless of what political philosophy you embrace, convince themselves that McCain won last night’s debate? You could argue it was a tie, but McCain certainly didn’t triumphantly defeat or crush Obama. And while we’re on the subject of parallel realities, does McCarthy really believe that Obama is a “terrorist sympathizer”? Does he believe that Obama has no interest in fighting terrorism? I mean, does he want to stand behind and claim moral ownership of these arguments? Because if he does, he reveals himself to be living in as warped a parallel reality as the abovementioned Fox Watchers. The most generous gloss of McCarthy’s claims is that he’s a pure cynic.
Which would be all well and good. I mean, you can dismiss political pundits for being the blowhards and cynics they often are, but when someone like McCarthy says Obama is a terrorist sympathizer doesn’t he realize that there are people out there who may believe him and take his proclamation literally, people like the Fox Watchers who have so internalized the ideological scripts handed down to them that they believe wholeheartedly McCain won last night?
If all the Fox Watchers of the world genuinely believe that Obama is a treasonous terrorist sympathizer and a pal of left-wing radicals and some sort of anti-American Manchurian Candidate determined to take down the country, despite a world of evidence to contradict such claims, I fear for our future.