Not long ago Mike Barnacle declared on MSNBC that the Presidential race was over and that Barack Obama had all but shored things up. It was in that moment I realized just how lopsided the reporting on this presidential event had become. I won’t cite the numerous polls showing a closing race, as I said not long ago polls are not to be believed this far away, I will simply cite the history of previous elections and their main stream media coverage in saying that something may just be missing in our current understanding of this race.

Think back, if you will, to the last two elections. I think often about that night in November of 04 when the networks had all but called the race for John Kerry based on their exit polls. Though sworn to secrecy they broadcast the message loud and clear, Kerry had it, their numbers couldn’t lie. Pollster John Zogby had declared on The Daily Show just hours before that Kerry would be the winner and a somber mood was reported in the White House. Yet with three million more votes cast and 286 electoral votes the mood quickly changed on television and in the administration.

For weeks the media needed to explain their miscalculation any way they could. Their final answer was something that still strikes me a little odd. The official vision of that election was that Karl Rove had masterfully and quietly persuaded 3 million Evangelical voters to turn out by tearing up the country over social issues. “Yes,” the media declared “that must be it! Everyone else hated Bush, was ready for a change, saw the light of John Kerry, except homophobic evangelicals hell bent on banning gay marriage.” The Democrats and their very liberal media counterparts felt thwarted again, still saw voter fraud in Ohio, still had Florida 2000 in their heads and couldn’t accept that a great deal of this nation might just be living and breathing a more conservative air.

Just as Pat Buchanan had famously calculated on a silent majority in the Vietnam era, an election that saw the rise of Richard Nixon, so too may the media be missing another silent majority, those who seek change from the status quo but aren’t ready to change themselves.

We all know where we are right now. The nation is ready to move on from President Bush, the individual, the commander in chief who doesn’t always seem to be the chief. But is the nation ready for the kind of change that Huffington Post and DailyKos can provide? Maybe I am biased, as I live in a world that is one half college professors and one half rural right wing. Upstate New York is happily not New York city, much of this space looks more like Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Missouri than it does Manhattan or San Francisco. When I hear “blue state” I think about all the counties that are not at the very Eastern tip of New York State and I have to laugh.

Yes we have our pockets full of lefties but the majority of those you will meet around these parts are anything but. Even those who call themselves Democrats are often blue collar working class people who cherish the second amendment, the church and the flag, who lament the loss of their jobs but hate government intervention and don’t worship at the alter of Noam Chomsky or George Cloony.

While the MSM sees slight appeal to the center as a movement by Obama away from the far left, much of what he said this week in Europe, especially his final speech in Germany, is as far away from Middle America as the ground is in Berlin. You can almost feel a sea change in the air, as right talk radio puts aside their grudge with McCain in favor of a policy directed at winning the war in Iraq, lowering taxes and seeking some small reduction in the size of government. There was plenty said this week by Obama on foreign soil that can be used for months in attack ads, expect that they are on the way.

Conservative apathy and outrage over Bush does not come from the President’s embrace of policies that are too far to the right, but instead too far to the left. While John McCain may not be a beacon of their hopes and dreams for government, Barack Obama is still a distant star in a far away galaxy for them. The more they learn, the less they like and you can start to feel something that doesn’t come across on MSNBC. America is coming to grips with itself, looking to find what it wants to be and I am having a hard time seeing how Pennsylvania, Missouri, Virginia, Florida, Ohio and a long list of other states are going to decide their future is in the 1960’s liberal philosophy of the past.

The media is presenting this race as a landslide and yet it isn’t even August. We haven’t had a single debate between the two candidates, we haven’t had a convention and the television advertising has just begun. The 527 groups are still writing their attacks and for the last week the Democratic candidate hasn’t even been in the country. So how can it really be decided?

Yes, the Obama team may have a winning strategy of hanging the failures of Bush around the neck of McCain. They MAY but we are a long way from finding out. I have a hunch that actually does come from a line of logic and historic precident and is starting to be proved by the polls and some of the backlash I am hearing. The more the media turns this into a one person race, the more working America is turning away.

I could be wrong, but I believe strongly this election is actually split. While the media is focusing on a 70-20 race, the country is still locked in the 50-50 divide of the last two cycles. My big evidence to prove my point is this. The media has come together around a pack mentality, a singular vision of the world they are presenting each and every night. Time and again, whenever this happens, we find out the opposite to be true. When everyone is writing the same story it is almost never evidence of truth but evidence that we don’t know what the real story is. The media has failed this nation so many times in just the last few years, I have a hard time believing that now will be any different, just because an Obama campaign slogan says so.

There are two people running in this race, the media and the Democrats and to a degree the Republicans just don’t know it yet. If I had to guess, we will all see it sometime in late October and on election night. While some see a Nixon or Reagan landslide ahead, I see a map very close to 2000 and 2004. Time will tell if I am right