TWO WEEKS

Posted at 6:51 a.m. ET

The election is two weeks from tomorrow.  It is absurd to deny our political condition. Assuming the polls are even reasonably accurate, Barack Obama, one of the most unprepared candidates for president in our recent history, will be elected, possibly by a substantial margin.  He will bring in additional Democratic senators and congressmen.

Obama has been campaigning, it seems, forever, and yet we still know so little about him.  Whole parts of his life have been blocked off and are deemed outside proper scrutiny.  His views seem vague and unformed.  His much-vaunted intellect reminds us of Jack Kennedy's description of the State Department, a bowl of Jell-O. 

Can anything be done to turn this race around?

Barring some October surprise that benefits McCain, it's unlikely, in large part because voters aren't getting the full story, the complete discussion.  People don't get their news directly.  They get it through media.  And the media corruption in this campaign has been the greatest I've seen in my lifetime.  The only race comparable, in terms of media bias, was the 1964 campaign pitting President Lyndon Johnson against Senator Barry Goldwater, in which Goldwater was widely portrayed as a fool and an extremist. 

But there is a critical difference between 1964 and 2008.  In 1964 we had, at least generally, a bipartisan foreign policy.  We said that "politics stops at the water's edge," a reflection of the common experience Americans had in World War II and the Cold War.  There were certainly differences in details, and criticism occurred regularly, but it was usually limited to tactics rather than the broad design.

That is not the case today.  To a frightening degree, the Democratic Party has become a true party of the left, increasingly similar to the European parties that American intellectuals love to love.  Many, but by no means all, Democrats are "anti-war," have contempt for the military, and believe that our pulling the plug on South Vietnam in 1975 - a Congressional vote in which Joe Biden participated - was a proud and noble moment.  To them, regimes like Iran's and North Korea's represent, not evil and danger, but "a different narrative."  We must explore their "legitimate grievances."  They believe that "Bush lied, thousands died," no matter how many investigations show that Bush did not lie in the runup to Iraq.  They choke at the word "victory," considering it chauvenistic and simplistic.  Worst of all, they consider it not quite intellectual.

The danger of the Democratic foreign policy is that it leaves reality for our children to deal with.  As 9-11 showed once more, those children grow up very quickly, and it's their blood that's spilled.  Another danger is that Democrats fail to be sensitive to the pace of technology, and how it can equip a small or backward nation with devastating firepower.

And yet, the entire issue of foreign policy has been submerged in this campaign by the economic shock.  Obama's foreign-policy view often seems limited to "talking" to people, as if the Bush administration has shut off the phones.  There is no discussion of what will happen if, and when, diplomacy fails.

There is still another great danger to this campaign.  The press bias itself risks the future of the press.  Make no mistake, the central personality of the press is arrogance.  The press will believe, rightly, that its bias was key to electing Obama, to "making a difference," which is what young journalists were taught to do in colleges and journalism schools.  That bias can become institutionalized, as it is in Europe.  It can get worse, not better.  The difference between European and American journalism is that, in the 20th century, American journalism moved toward greater professionalism, toward an attempt at reasonable, if imperfect neutrality.  That movement has been stopped cold in the shadow of the sixties generation.  What a tragedy for the press, what a greater tragedy for Americans.

We can be wise only if we have correct information.  When that information is filtered through a press that set out to destroy Sarah Palin and Cindy McCain, even to destroy Joe the Plumber, the "informed public" becomes a dream.

Much is at stake in two weeks.  American seem unaware of it.

October 20, 2008.