The premise is that the mainstream media wants Democrats elected, and seeks the defeat of Republicans.

It can be an unconscious thing – most reporters are liberals, so it makes sense that their coverage will subtly shade things – or a very conscious one (like, I suspect, the past 25 years of the Strib Minnesota Poll and HHH Institute Polls or the assembled life’s work of Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman).

And as we head into election time, the media faces one challenge – and the challenge is big enough to warrant bold italics.

The ideological media’s mission is to keep people from asking and answering the question “are you better off than you were four years ago) under any circumstances.

(Except in states like, say, North Dakota and Minnesota, where the mission is to obscure the reasons that people are doing, if not better than four years ago, at least better than the rest of the country, which is of course behind the Strib’s effort to portray Mark Dayton as the engine behind MInnesota’s success, despite his complete legislative failure).

Which brings us to the op-ed from the WaPo by Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation, dutifully h reprinted by the Strib the other day, and which is such a clear object lesson in the media’s approach to diverting Joe Public’s attention from the bold-italic question above.

No, really.  After the requisite sane and sober start…:

My advice in the weeks to come: Don’t let the giddiness of the campaign coverage distract from what will really matter.

…Vanden Heuvel all but restates my premise – “ignore how your’e doing and focus on these shiny rhetorical objects!” – word for word if not motivation for motivation; I’ll add emphasis:

Instead, pay attention to three issues that could affect the outcome of the election, even though they have nothing to do with the campaigns themselves:

It boggles the brain.

First, a surge in voting restrictions: In 2011, 14 states passed laws making it harder for certain Americans, particularly minorities and young people, to vote.

Leaving aside the patronizing bigotry – “minorities and young people” can’t find a driver’s license?  The franchise for which their forefathers fought and died isn’t worth the effort that it takes to get and carry a damn free state ID? – the issue is an attempt by the left to create a bloody shirt of grievance to try to motivate youth and minorities, who turned the election for Obama in ’08, and who are, inconveniently, looking to be extraordinarily un-motivated this time around (Afro-Americans, and Latinos).

The goal is to keep traditional Democratic constituencies from casting ballots, and methods include requiring voters to show government-issued IDs (which more than 1 in 10 Americans lack), reducing or ending early voting, and disenfranchising citizens with criminal records.

If I were a Democrat, I’m not sure I’d like Vanden Heuvel’s insinutation that the irresponsible, the criminal, and those to lazy and unmotivated the legal right to take an hour off from work to vote are their natural constituencies.

Vanden Heuvel trots out a slew of innuendos that cater to the ill-informed – who clearly are a Democrat constituency:

In Texas, for example, a concealed handgun license is a sufficient form of voter identification, but a university ID

Because a carry permit actually is evidence that one is a permanent resident at an address, in a way that a university ID is not.

In Wisconsin, a voter without an ID needs a birth certificate to get one, but a voter without a birth certificate needs a valid ID to obtain one.

Then…change the state law?

In Tennessee, a 96-year-old African-American woman was denied a free voter ID because she didn’t have a copy of her marriage license.

Right.  Because government never makes mistakes.  And because outlier cases define the issue.

NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous has described the efforts as the most coordinated attack on voting rights since the days of Jim Crow.

And if you can count on anyone for measured, logical rhetoric when the time comes to distract people from the question “are you better off now than you were four years ago?”, it’s Benjamin Todd Jealous (/sarcasm off).

There’s a larger philosophical question that is ripe for debate – “is it possible to make it too easy to vote?  One should not discouragie people from voting, of course, but the Democrat model of corralling everyone they can find and driving them like compliant sheep to the polls – frequently not knowing anything about the issues or the candidates – doesn’t speak well of our democracy.

But that’s not the issue, here; it’s “watch the media work start to work overtime to try to divert the voter’s attention away from the real questions in this election.

Tomorrow, the next rhetorical shiny object – big bad money (from Republicans only, naturally).