Meet the fantastic Mr Fox

Only a year ago the American right was in a state of cataleptic shock as the Democrats won the House of Representatives, the Senate and the presidency. Conservatism looked as though it was headed for the skids, while the left celebrated its startling comeback.

No longer. A populist right-wing revolt against big-government liberalism has sent Obama’s poll ratings plummeting and left the Democrats fearing a battering in the midterm 2010 elections. The Republican Scott Brown’s surprise victory in the race for the late Ted Kennedy’s seat is just the latest blow for poor Obama.

How did this all happen so quickly? Look no further than Roger Ailes, the chairman and CEO of Fox News, the notoriously right-wing, Rupert Murdoch-owned TV channel.

To the chagrin of CNN and other channels, which didn’t take Ailes seriously when he first created Fox News in 1996, he has been sensationally successful at turning his cable-news channel into a profit-making enterprise. He has deftly mixed gorgeous blonde anchors with abrasive commentators to galvanise a conservative base that is incensed by what it believes is Obama’s attempt to create a socialist dictatorship.

Howard Fineman, the influential Newsweek pundit, last week anointed Ailes as the ‘real head’ of the Republican party. ‘Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum,’ he wrote, ‘which is why God created Roger Ailes. The president of Fox News is, by default, the closest thing there is to a kingmaker in Anti-Obama America.’ Ailes has even been touted as possible presidential timber for 2012 by his chum Frank Luntz, a prominent Republican pollster and author.

To his liberal adversaries, however, Ailes is a kind of malevolent Voldemort who must be stopped from terrorising the innocent and credulous American populace. The Obama White House tried to exclude Fox reporters from press pools.