Earlier this evening, I was thinking about how to win an election in the United States.  Longer-term, on the scale of parties rather than individual candidates, I think the method is pretty simple to understand:

1. Exclude as many voters as possible.  Race/gender/religion-excluding laws are historically effective.  So is convincing voters the result is a foregone conclusion (think daily "horse-race" reports of political polls, or election-night exit poll reports).  Frequently implying fraud or tampering is effective -- who would bother to vote if they knew their vote would be stolen or ignored?  Making it difficult to vote is important, as well (e.g., holding an election in the middle of a work day).
   
2. Motivate your "base."  "Base" is defined, as seems reasonable to me, as "those people who will vote for you, regardless."  That is, these are the people who will vote despite the measures taken in step 1, and who will reliably vote for you.
3. Moderate your statements to the general public just enough to persuade just enough of those voters not dissuaded by the measures taken in step 1, but who are also not members of your base, to win their votes.  N.B., if steps 1 & 2 are executed well enough, step 3 is unnecessary.

I was thinking about this, because I was thinking about the political media.  It's common to think of O'Reilly/Olberman as someone who stimulates his party's base, and castigates the opposition's.  But what if you turn that on its head?  What I'm getting at here, is that a person used to be a conservative because he held conservative values.  That is, he valued not-endangering the stable status quo over possibly improving society by engaging in experiment.  A "liberal" held opposite views.  What I'm wondering is if that's still the case.  Turn the media relationship on its head -- is a "conservative" still someone who holds conservative values?  Or is a "conservative" someone who listens to Rush Limbaugh?  And might "liberal" be a word meaning "listens to NPR?"  And -- if that is the case -- have we reached the point where we politically self-identify that way?

Why think about this?  Because, if the chain-of-supposition holds, and we are really politically self-identifying with media outlets, then we (as a society) are over.  O'Reilly/Olberman is paid to attack the other side -- whoever that is.  We can't work with the opposition, understand them, possibly learn from them, find ways to accomodate our differences while still accomplishing what needs to be done if we fundamentally define our own position in terms of how wrong the other guys are.  Agreement becomes literally unthinkable, because agreement would destroy our political identity.