Old media narratives die hard. Once people latch onto something they believe in, it can be very difficult to change their minds, especially if there's an emotional attachment involved.

See, for example, the "George W. Bush is an idiot" narrative. People who dislike the president will believe this myth 'til the day they die. Reminding these people that Bush has an MBA from Harvard University and that his grades at Yale were better than the supposedly brilliant John Kerry won't do any good. There's always a way to explain away inconvenient truths — in this case, we're told Bush's success in the Ivy League is due entirely to his father's meddling on his behalf.

And speaking of John Kerry, how about that how Swift Boat story? There, the media narrative is that Kerry was unfairly smeared by politically-motivated pawns of Karl Rove. "Swift Boating" has become a synonym for any kind of unfair attack on someone's character. But when Kerry was challenged to actually disprove the allegations made against him by his fellow veterans, and offered $1 million to do so, he couldn't do it. Well, of course he couldn't, because the Swift Boat story, as it exists in the popular consciousness, is a lie, and you can't prove lies are the truth.

But if all you're trying to do is win an election, you don't need to prove that the fables you tell are the Gospel. All you need to do is keep lying & spinning.

That's the position Barack Obama is in right now. His remarks in San Francisco, deriding Pennsylvanians as gun-toting, Bible-thumping rednecks, were actually nothing new. Liberals say this kind of thing about midwesterners all the time. For example, Charlie Rangel asked recently why anyone would want to live in a dump like Mississippi. The only real difference between his comment and Obama's is that Rangel wasn't running a campaign in Ole Miss.

Still, if Jeremiah Wright's hate-filled diatribes weren't enough to sink Obama, there's no reason to believe this controversy will. All he's got to do is spin — explain to all the rubes out there that he didn't really mean to call 'em rubes. And it'll work, because the media narrative about Obama is that he's a genuinely nice guy. A uniter, not a divider. And so if he utters remarks that seem elitist or disdainful, it's not he who is wrong, it's you who are wrong for not understanding what he really meant.

It'll take much more than insulting rural gun nuts to get the media (who largely agree with Obama anyway), to change their narrative on "Mr. Nice Guy."