Atrios has been noticing this sort of thing for a while now:

Obama's own missteps, amplified by Hillary Clinton's negativity, have defined a narrative likely to follow him until Election Day.

In politics, a narrative -- the widely held, sometimes unfair shorthand that marks a candidate -- is difficult to shift. For Dan Quayle, it was fresh-faced intellectual vacuity. For John Kerry, it was a combination of hauteur and inconstancy.

The Obama narrative is intellectual and ideological (not social) elitism. Humble roots have never been a guarantee of intellectual humility, especially when a mind comes to flower at Columbia and Harvard. Obama's dismissal of small-town views and values as "bitterness," "fear" and "anger" -- his dismissal of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a relic of an angry generation -- comes across as, well, dismissive. His first instinct -- the academic instinct -- is to explain and analyze, which is impressive to political writers who share that particular vocation. But this approach always places the explainer in a position of superiority. The arrogance of the aristocrat is nothing compared to the arrogance of the academic.

The problem here is not that Obama is unpatriotic -- a foolish, unfair, destructive charge -- but that Obama has declared himself superior to an almost universal form of popular patriotism. And this sense of superiority, revealed in case after case, has political consequences, because the Obama narrative reinforces the Democratic narrative. It is now possible to imagine Obama at a cocktail party with Kerry, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis, sharing a laugh about gun-toting, Bible-thumping, flag-pin-wearing, small-town Americans.

Shorter Gerson: our media narrative is broken. Gee, how did that happen? It certainly wasn't anything I or any of my buddies did.

Atrios is curious about the lack of agency the media elites attribute to these broken narratives, as if they had their own volition. It reminds me of what they used to say in Brazil back when the regime changed about every fifteen minutes: "the government fell itself over." Well, it didn't.

Anyway, I'm beginning to see this as simply a more sophisticated form of thuggery. Nice campaign narrative you've got going there. It'd be a shame if something should happen to it. Maybe if you give some interviews and let me help shape your message, I could make sure everything stayed jake. That would explain why Obama went on Fox News, among other things.

Sigh.

Pee Ess: Just as a reminder, paying the protection money doesn't work.