Watch him on "Hardball," a career Beltway insider gasping and wheezing through his renegade calisthenics. Sooner or later, watching him closely, you can practically hear the little fire bell of his conscience ringing madly, and a tiny voice whispering, "What in Christ's name am I doing talking political theory on national television with an unreconstructed nutball like Gordon Liddy?" Bill O'Reilly is loud, abrasive, and approximately 50 percent as smart as he thinks he is, but he never has these moments where he falls so completely out of character.

Or, let us consider Phil Donahue, the Great Gray Hope on which MSNBC has hung its new prime-time lineup. There is no question that Donahue created a character -- three generations of "Saturday Night Live" casts have had someone who performed it -- and, perhaps, he is something of a template for O'Reilly in this regard. But the Donahue character is hopelessly out of its time. Its age has passed. He is as obsolete in the universe of television talk as the boys from the Ponderosa would be on "NYPD Blue." And, if a recent New York Times story is to be believed, the idea that they may have attached the vaunted remake of their network to an exercise in nostalgia already has begun to give the NBC suits a bad case of the vapors.

It may be completely artificial -- Kinsley and Wolcott are both correct about that -- but it is authentically artificial, which counts in a time in which we watch baseball in modern old-time ballparks while wearing genuine replica gear. The tabloid soul is never so thoroughly undermined as it is by guilt, and O'Reilly has been formed as its perfect public expression, by a corporate culture in which the tabloid soul is intact and pure.

I don't know when progressive politicians in general lost touch with the tabloid soul. Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, stalwart foe of NAFTA and proudly untriangulated old Democrat, suspects that it might have been educated out of the party -- that the progressive elite simply lost the proper respect for manufacturing jobs and the people who depend on them. Michael Moore has argued, correctly, that this often evinces itself in a liberal disdain for things like bowling. In any event, in abandoning the tabloid soul, progressive politicians generally -- and the Democratic Party in close specific -- have developed a number of traits quite lethal to a true opposition party.

They repeatedly underestimate the voter's capacity to support measures contrary to the voter's good simply because they are packaged in an entertaining way. They cannot fashion responses to naked charlatanism because they don't take it seriously enough as a political force. They don't understand that it doesn't matter if Bill O'Reilly is really a blue-collar hero as long as he can play one on television. They repeatedly are surprised by how seductive is the fakery of the carnival midway, even though that's how Rupert Murdoch got rich enough to afford a Newt Gingrich of his very own.

Not me, though. Not after that wonderful evening in Foley's, where I gave the royal bazoo to Ted Kennedy, and watched my colleague cheer and dance and bite people from other newspapers in support of a guy who'd sell us all to the Malay pirates if it meant another inch gained in support of his towering ambition. We were the alternative press, and The Man couldn't close us down. I cheered as loudly as anyone. For one brief moment, I was Bill O'Reilly. The idea still wakes me screaming in the night, not the least because I meant every word.

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