No. The media didn't consider this worth any ink, not even after Joe the Plumber prompted Obama to let slip, clearly and unequivocally, his antipathies to basic capitalism: "When you spread the wealth around," Obama famously said, "I think it's good for everybody."

Despite the code of silence (omerta) maintained by the prObamedia (prObamerta), these stories and others like them have still come out in dribs, drabs and funny feelings, infusing the body politic with enough uneasiness about Obama's ideological affinities for the left to keep John McCain surprisingly and perhaps even resiliently competitive. Despite the disgrace of our free-but-self-caged press, many voters have managed to learn for themselves that Obama has spent a lifetime associating with the kind of anti-Americans and subversives that, by rights, make him ineligible for a federal security clearance -- something Daniel Pipes has noted. Many voters understand that when you "spread the wealth around" you are enacting a basic premise of Marxism, or communism, or socialism, or something once upon a time derided as plain old commie-pinko. But that was a long time ago, and the fact is, we just don't know how many Americans are still put off, if not outraged, by such things.

And maybe this becomes the most important question to be settled on Nov. 4: How many Americans still consider mixing with and supporting bomb-throwers and radicals to be un-presidential? How many Americans still consider a Marxist basis for economics to be, in fact, downright un-American?

That such questions need to be asked, that such answers are in doubt, indicates the extent to which we have already changed as a people, and that is not a hopeful thing. Perhaps the miscalculation many conservatives made throughout this campaign was in assuming that Obama's alliances and working relationships with leftists and leftist causes were things most Americans would vigorously and automatically reject.

Then again, maybe they still will.