The leftist media doesn’t just hate George Bush: it constantly tells us how terrible everything is in our country (e.g., it’s breathless reporting of Bill Clinton’s insanely dishonest contention that the economy in 1992 was “the worst economy in 50 years”), unless of course a Democrat is in the White House, in which case that same Bill Clinton could probably have raped a goat on the White House lawn and seen his approval ratings go up “because the economy is so good.”

Could there be some bias here?

Well, regardless of your opinion on that (and six straight years of an unbelievably strong Bush economy without any meaningful acknowledgment of same by the press would indicate there might be at least a little), the American people aren’t buying it.

Despite an unending media drumbeat of “the sky is falling”, one which certainly shows up in polls about how people feel about the economy overall, a new Gallup poll finds that “more than 8 in 10 Americans say they are satisfied with their personal lives at this time, including a solid majority who say they are ‘very satisfied.’”

This is why John Edwards is failing: his “two Americas” just don’t exist.

But it also shows how badly Republicans are failing to communicate the truth of what’s going on in this country. Everyone — and I do mean virtually everyone — is doing well, even beyond well, and yet the GOP continues to allow the left to define white as black and black as white.

Reagan, without benefit of talk radio or the internet, overcame these sorts of lies. Republicans have a lot of lessons to learn from the Gipper, but they better start learning this one. Well-off people who think their neighbors are suffering will vote for crippling socialist measures to alleviate pain which isn’t there. And when they do, it will be as much our fault as the left’s.

Maybe. The Independent certainly thinks so, and makes a decent case, which although (in my humble opinion) premature and overly focused on economics (as similar discussions of Japan were in the 1980s), certainly represents the shape of things to come.