“Red Truth, Blue Truth”

There's longish, committee-written ad on CNNs website (and I think from Time magazine) called “Red Truth, Blue Truth” which does do a good job of summing up the essential creepiness underlying the political debate in the US, where there are only two sides to every issue, and you seem to have to pick one side and by God stick to it. And if you do, you get taken care of, with your own set of facts and explanations for every story provided to you through media channels with the same viewpoint as you who won't bother you with facts if they don't serve the ultimate purpose of getting their guy in power.

When the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth launched its ads claiming that Kerry had embellished his war record, the accusations fell on fertile soil. Quite apart from Red America, in the purple enclaves of Missouri and Ohio, there were plenty of voters who would hear the charges on cable or online and believe there was something to them. Only 29% of voters in last week's New York Times/CBS poll think Kerry is telling the entire truth about his Vietnam service, and 49% think he's mostly truthful but hiding something.

But back in the Blue World the Kerry team inhabited, the "larger truth" was that it was outrageous for a President and a Vice President who supported the Vietnam War but didn't fight in it to stand by while their surrogates questioned Kerry's service. Even if the charges were coming from an independent group of veterans, the Kerry camp thought it could rely on the mainstream media to police the situation and inform voters that they were false. Kerry adviser Bob Shrum, says a Democratic strategist, "kept telling Kerry over and over, 'We don't need to respond. It's only a $170,000 ad buy. Nobody will hear it.'"

But Shrum was assuming that the old order was still in place, not realizing that old media and their insurgent competitors are locked in an asymmetrical conflict, with one set of outlets following the traditional conventions of neutrality and balanced coverage and the other not.

So when the talk shows began covering the charges, they adhered to those conventions and gave equal time to those leveling the attacks and the Kerry representatives disputing them. "Every credible news organization knocked down their allegations," moans a Democratic strategist as if that mattered.

"They didn't understand what was going on," Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi says of the Kerry team. "It was almost like, 'That's not true, so we don't need to respond.' That's the trap they fell into. They just got the big wake-up call that it doesn't work that way anymore."

The real irony is, of course, that most of the policy positions of the US Democratic party fall somewhere to the right of our Conservative party, and the two US parties are seen as being closer together ideologically than other political systems in the rest of the world. Yet thanks to the two-party system, the opposition to each other is actually much stronger than the animosity between political parties here or in Europe.

While the so-called “red truth” relies on wild conspiracy theories about the UN acting in consort with a cadre of gays and intellectuals and libertine Hollywood and New York types (they're at least usually smart enough not to directly name the Jews anymore..) controlling the media and undermining everything good about America, and have accused the mainstream media of being liberally biased for decades now, despite any and all evidence to the contrary. (where were the pictures of what was really going on in Iraq on ABC or CNN? They weren't there.) the “blue truth” might be more along the lines of Michael Moore's pontification about constant war leading to an undemocratic, hierarchical society. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, we saw greedy people starting a war so they could steal oil. No need to elaborate further on their motivations, it was enough that they were doing it to realize they were dangerous.

I had a political science professor in 4th year who told a story of what life in Austria was like in the 1950s. People were so bitterly divided politically that they couldn't even stand looking at each other. You had socialist bicycle clubs and People's Party bicycle clubs (brush up on your Austrian political history here.) and of course the requisite two newspapers, and two sets of the truth. In Austria at least the super-scary authoritarian white supremacist party, also known as the Freedom Party, has at least, with its 5% share of the popular vote, provided a reminder of who the real extremists are. While in the US, for lack of any alternative, and with third parties like Perot actually being more centrist, they take to seeing each other as the extremists across the aisle.

Then again, if you ask an Albertan what he thinks of Maritimers you might see that we aren't above our own petty divisiveness either.