Brian's point that "at the end of election season, actual voters made their decisions on the basis of artifice like Fred Thompson's pick up truck and not on the basis of more serious metrics" is a fair one. The question is why they made that judgment.
Since neither Brian nor I know a whole lot about Tennessee, a more fruitful example may be 2000, when many voters decided to go with the apparently authentic, tough, salt-of-the-earth type rather than the sighing exaggerator. In that case, too, voters cast ballots based on the superficial heuristics that stood in for the election's meganarrative.
But if the media hadn't been atoning for its own insecurities by constantly deriding Gore's wonkish pedantry while making Bush's inexperience and bluster seem like a sort of Heartland wisdom, the outcome might have been very different. It's not hard to imagine an election in which Bush's ignorance of policy became an overwhelmingly negative narrative in just the way Kerry's indecisiveness was. The media simply chose not to do things that way. After all, they know blustery, indecisive intellectuals, and dislike many of them. They don't know people who work on a ranch and don't crave their approval. And without some experience with such types, who are they to judge?
