WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 —  I’d like to report a mugging. About two weeks ago I wrote a column in this (cyber)space which took issue with the argument, made on MSNBC cable by commentator Mike Barnicle, that Middle America had voted for George W. Bush because people there have a stronger devotion to family values. While I admitted there was some truth to the argument that the center of the country has different social mores from the coasts, I thought it too superficial.
 
       TO SHOW AN equally superficial — and equally wrong — view of Middle America, I listed a series of atrocities that occurred in states that voted Republican for president: a black man who was lynched, men who were murdered because others thought they were gay, right-wing terrorist bombings. Both before and after that parade of atrocities, I made it clear that I did not think those places could be judged solely by those monstrous crimes.
 
OUT OF CONTEXT
       Any fair-minded person who read my column would have seen that. But then I was mugged. First by Peggy Noonan, the pretentious and tendentious writer who made her fame and fortune first by taking credit for Ronald Reagan’s public utterances, and more recently by a diatribe against the first lady. Noonan’s comments were so over-the-top they most likely helped Hillary Clinton drub GOP Congressman Rick Lazio, her opponent in the New York Senate race. Later the mugging was joined by Michael Kelly, a columnist for the The Washington Post, and by the Prince of Darkness himself, my friend Robert Novak. All of them ran the argument about evil in Middle America. None of them noted that I had rejected that argument.
       The rhetorical device I employed was the strawman: an argument that is stated only to be rejected. To ascribe that strawman to me would be like taking the “not” out of the statement, “I do not believe the pope is an antichrist,” — then attacking me for anti-Catholic bigotry.
I relish the back-and-forth of political jousting, and from years in the Clinton White House I’ve developed the hide of a rhinoceros. But it is dishonest, in the words of columnist Joe Conason, who has leaped to my defense, to strip away all context and tell the world I embrace a view that I in fact rejected.

THE MISSING PIECES
       Here’s the context that my critics left on the cutting room floor: I pointed out that the vast majority of people who voted for Bush are good people. I noted that Middle America on that same election day had embraced gun control and rejected school vouchers, and sent some of the most ardent right-wingers in the anti-Clinton impeachment mob packing. I further noted that Middle America helped Democrats gain seats in the House, the Senate and state legislatures — hardly the stuff of bigotry.
I was trying to show that the middle of the country — where I grew up and went to school, but which Peggy Noonan merely flies over between her Hollywood screenwriting and Washington screedwriting — is a much more complicated place than the Northeastern elite wants to admit.
       I’d like to believe that my right-wing critics simply missed my point. Or that I as a writer had been too subtle to make my point clear. But here is how I concluded that now-infamous piece: “My point is that Middle America is a far more complicated place than even a gifted commentator like Mike Barnicle gives us credit for. It’s not all just red and blue — or black and white.”
       That’s an explicit rejection of the argument that Middle America is racist. Like the rest of the column, it argues for a more sophisticated, nuanced view of America. But you can’t expect sophistication and nuance to be appreciated by muggers.
       Perhaps the better response to the sea-of-red argument would have been to stick to political science, the subject I teach at Georgetown University, and to point out that America has never subscribed to the land mass theory of presidential selection. It’s “one man (and now, one woman), one vote,” not “one mile, one vote.” If capturing vast expanses of lightly populated terrain were the key to electoral success, Al Gore would have spent $20 million and countless days campaigning in Alaska.
       But I didn’t. I chose to illustrate the inaccuracy of a facile argument by making an equally facile — and equally inaccurate — counter-argument. I do not believe I underestimated the sophistication of my readers. But I do think I underestimated the need for the right to feel victimized — the desire of the overprivileged to feel put-upon. Just like the old, discredited left of the 60s, the right-wingers draw succor from feeling victimized — and that sense of victimhood provides a rationalization for their adoption of the equally discredited, ruthless call of the old left to pursue its goals “by any means necessary.”