Jon Margolis, former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

Everybody likes a good story, the kind with a beginning, a middle, and a satisfying end.

To be satisfying, the end need not be happy.  But it has to mean something. Not that every story needs a moral, as such.  But it should have a coherent theme, so that it isn’t just a hodge-podge of unrelated incidents.

Needless to say, reporters like stories, too, but the word has two meanings for us.  The “story” that we write for the newspaper (or whatever: replace with the medium of your choice) is not a “story” in the literary sense.  The news story that just reports the incidents, unrelated or not, but does so accurately, is a good story, with or without a satisfying end.

But reporters aren’t just reporters.  We’re also people, and like all those other folks, we, too, like a good story (literary definition).  Besides, it’s more fun to write a news story which is also a good story in that other sense, a story that means something.  Hence the inclination to try to find a theme, to create, out of those seemingly unrelated incidents, a narrative.

It’s a healthy inclination because sometimes there really is a theme linking disparate incidents.  If so, it’s foolish not to recognize that theme and deal with it.  The story (news definition) that comes out of that recognition ends up being far more interesting and far more meaningful than a mere recitation of the particulars.

But it’s also a dangerous inclination.  At worst, it can tempt a reporter to find a theme where there is none.  But that’s pretty rare.  The insults of certain blogosphere media critics to the contrary notwithstanding, few reporters are fools.  Fewer yet want to write falsehoods.

The more common danger is the temptation to fit the facts to the chosen narrative, even where the narrative does not completely explain what is happening.  The result here is not exactly a falsehood, but it’s not exactly the truth, either.

This year, the dominant political narrative centers around the angry, alienated, voter.  It’s real enough.  This narrative began to form with the rise last year of the Tea Party movement, a populist uprising against the policies of the Obama Administration—the Troubled Assets Relief Program (which started under the Bush Administration), the auto company bail-out, the “stimulus,” the spending, the deficits, and most of all the health care law.

Reporters never suggested that the Tea Partiers represented a majority of the voters, but polling did seem to indicate that majorities agreed with them on some issues.  Well beyond the Tea Party precincts, voters were worried about spending, and most polls showed that pluralities, if not majorities, opposed the health care changes backed by Obama and the Democrats.

If anybody doubted the Tea Party’s clout (and many did, in part because it is hardly a unified movement) the doubt all but evaporated in January when a Republican, Scott Brown, won the special election in Massachusetts to fill out the remainder of the late Ted Kennedy’s term.

A Republican? In Massachusetts? To replace Ted Kennedy? Something must have been going on here.  Ramp up the political narrative.

And indeed, up it ramped.  For months, it’s been all but impossible to find a political analysis that did not center around the theme of the alienated, anti-establishment, anti-incumbent, anti-Washington electorate, seething with anger at…well, at whatever and whomever is in power.  It’s almost been as though nothing else in politics mattered.

But other things do matter, and by last month, the dangers of narrative overkill were there for all to see.  In Pennsylvania, Republican-turned Democrat Sen. Arlen Specter lost the Democratic primary to Rep. Joseph Sestak, thanks to, said no less than the New York Times in its lead paragraph, “an anti-incumbent wave that is defining the midterm elections.”

Specter Defeat Signals a Wave against Incumbents

True enough, as far as it went.  But perhaps it did not go far enough, ignoring another “anti-“ sentiment in Pennsylvania, where primary voters might have been anti-incumbent, anti-Washington, anti-establishment, and maybe even anti-Obama.

But without doubt they were anti-Specter.

This was, after all, a Democratic primary. Democratic primary voters are…Democrats.  In Pennsylvania, they are all registered Democrats, among whom voting against Arlen Specter is almost as instinctive as breathing.  A 50-year-old registered Democrat has been voting against Arlen Specter every six years all his or her adult life.

Furthermore, winner Sestak is not exactly an anti-establishment character. He is a sitting (or incumbent, as it is sometimes known) member of the House of Representatives.  Before that he was a vice admiral in the Navy. That’s about as establishment is one gets.

Actually, none of the “anti-establishment” candidates who defeated or scared incumbents or party favorites was a real outsider.  That was no truck driver who walked in off the streets to force Sen. Blanche Lincoln into a runoff (which she won).  It was Lt. Gov. (as in, incumbent) Bill Halter. Sharron Angle is real Tea Party challenger who won in an upset to become the Republican Senate candidate in Nevada.  But she’s a former party chairman, making her at least as much an insider as an outsider. Even Rand Paul, who overwhelmed the Kentucky Republican backed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to win the Senate nomination, can’t really qualify as an interloper.  His father is a long-time Texas Congressman.

There’s at least one more danger in relying too much on “the narrative.”  The more it’s repeated, the stronger it grows. People are not sheep.  But they can be persuaded. “Men,” Emerson said, “are convertible.”  So they are, and so are women, both converted in part by what they read in the newspapers, see on television, catch on line.  If they keep seeing and hearing, “the voters are angry,” they’re going to think that…the voters are angry.

In which case, some will think, “I must be angry, too. After all, I’m a voter.” After a while, the voter who is not angry might begin to feel as though he or she is out of it, sort of like being the only one in the office who hasn’t yet seen Avatar.

None of which means there is no voter anger, no anti-incumbent sentiment.  But it is not universal.  Almost every incumbent member of Congress who sought re-nomination this year has won it.  Voters still care about a candidate’s party, personality, and policies.  Voters also keep changing their minds.  At least one recent poll showed that a small majority was in favor of the health care law.  This story had its beginning, but it is still in its middle. Whether, or how, its end will be satisfying is part of the mystery.
 

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