Now that it’s over, the truth can be told. Barack Obama was not elected president because he ran a consistent, on-message campaign. He wasn’t elected because he’s a brilliant speaker opposing the policies of a deeply unpopular president.

John McCain didn’t lose because he couldn’t get far enough from that same president, or because a substantial majority of Americans quickly decided that his chosen running mate was grating, creepy and dismayingly ill-informed.

It wasn’t because 65 million American voters agreed with Obama, while only 57 million backed McCain.

Nah, it was all us. It was everyone’s favorite scapegoat, the liberal media.

Specifically, it was me. That’s right, I did it. In fact, I voted four million times in crucial swing states.

Ohio and Pennsylvania were easy. The real pain was driving to Florida, especially with a stop for gas and 14,000 more votes in North Carolina.

Though I got stuck with all the voting and driving, I’m not really in charge of The Conspiracy. I’m only second vice president.

The first vice president is Larry Flynt, of Hustler magazine fame, but I have to do most of his work since he’s lousy at taking notes at board meetings. The president is Elvis J. “Fig” Newton, a high-school sports columnist at the Tortilla Flat, Ariz., Weekly Worker.

But wait, you ask: What about all the staunchly conservative owners and editors like Rupert Murdoch and FOX News founder Roger Ailes? What about known conservative outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, and the long right-wing traditions of press magnates like Robert McCormick and William Randolph Hearst?

Ah, they’re just kidding. It’s useful cover. In fact, the biggest leftists out there are Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, who have worked so hard to make the far right look utterly out of their minds.

It certainly couldn’t be explained by anything reasonable, such as a convenient confusion of cause and effect. Surely reporters don’t follow trends, then get accused of leading them.

Well, OK, we do like to make predictions. Every network wants to be the first one to correctly call an issue, state or race: Reporters ask people who they plan to vote for, and the majority say “Obama.” On the air or in print, the word goes out that “voters are for Obama.” Partisans for the other side see this and say, “Ahh, obviously the media is against us.”

Why would we make something like that up? We are, after all, Muslims. Every one of us. Most people don’t know that each of the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world went to journalism school. Just like Obama. We covered that up, too.

Every contentious election generates a few performances from kooks, but this one really brought them out of the woodwork. The most bizarrely improbable stories made the rounds, usually by mass e-mail, always in hysterically angry tones, and usually about Obama. A few circulated about McCain or Sarah Palin, but not nearly as many, or as weird. Just glance at one of the rumor-debunking sites like Snopes.com, and you’ll see a short list of items about McCain, a slightly longer list about Palin, and page after page about Obama.

The whole argument that the electorate was duped by a liberal-media cabal just doesn’t add up. After all, this bias is supposedly obvious and widely accepted. If everyone knows we can’t be trusted, why were so many taken in? Why did so many millions just believe it?

Maybe it’s just because people realized that the scare stories were not only wildly improbable, but contradictory, such as the claims that Obama’s really a Muslim who will impose Taliban-style law, but also promote late-term abortion and gay marriage. Last time I checked, Muslim fundamentalists weren’t any more keen on those ideas than Southern Baptists are.

The most furious charge I heard repeated ad nauseam is that “nobody really knows anything about Obama; he came out of nowhere, and the liberal media is refusing to investigate him.”

Puhleeze.

There’s a huge difference between not investigating and investigating but not finding anything of significance. What little did turn up obviously didn’t turn too many opinions against him.

I’ve seen book after book about Obama, many of which aren’t at all complimentary. But their accusations didn’t stand up to closer scrutiny, and other investigators – not media outlets, but law enforcement – found nothing of substance to pursue in allegations about his connections with people like Chicago big wheel Tony Reszko. I suspect that the complainers are just mad that investigations didn’t turn up the things they wanted to find. They weren’t interested in truth, just bringing Obama down.

Come on, do you really think that a major-party candidate didn’t get thoroughly checked out by his own party – especially by other members of that party who were trying to defeat him in the primaries? Go ahead, tell me that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have delighted in finding real proof that Obama wasn’t who he said he was.

As I was typing up some notes for this column, a relevant anecdote unfolded in the newsroom. A couple of guys came in to insist that I “investigate” a crackpot lawsuit that a guy named Philip Berg filed in Pennsylvania. This was big news – it was being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court!

Berg was alleging – with no evidence – that Obama’s birth certificate isn’t really a birth certificate, though various nonpartisan groups examined it and said there was no more reason to doubt his citizenship than that of anyone else born in Hawaii. A federal judge threw out Berg’s suit as nutty and patently false.

Various right-wing bloggers began harrumphing furiously about why there was so little “Main Stream Media” coverage; in response, my interlocutors said I should break this conspiracy of silence.

Well, here you go, guys: It’s nonsense. Also, the Daily News prefers covering actual news in southcentral Kentucky; our Pennsylvania rumors-and-fantasies bureau is understaffed.

In person, I was similarly skeptical of their improbable claims. Just about anyone can appeal to the Supreme Court, but very few cases are heard. Most are like Berg’s, which naturally includes the standard accusation that the media “follows it’s (sic) agenda” to suppress the news. His “law suite” (sic) brims with fury and poor spelling, and shows the handiwork of a true conspiracy theorist: when facts don’t match belief, that obviously just proves the conspiracy is even bigger – now the Hawaiian government’s in on it! Nonpartisan groups verify the birth certificate’s accuracy? They’re Democratic stooges! Judges throw out suits as frivolous? The whole judicial system’s been bought off!

Pretty soon you’re sitting in a cave holding a hunting rifle, sitting on a barrel of beef jerky and denouncing the rest of the planet for being dupes of … reality.

My questioners left, probably convinced I was getting campaign kickbacks. But their story, I’m sure, lives on. The actual lawsuit’s inadequacies will be glossed over, but the tale of how the evil media worked in concert to suppress negative “news” will be told and retold, until another “fact” has been solemnly entered in conspiracy theorists’ big book of grievances.

Now that the election’s been settled by a wide margin, I suspect all the wild accusations will die down to a resentful muttering. Maybe a few – though, I’m sure, far from all – will take a cue from McCain’s own gracious and impressive concession. Speaking to a crowd of angry supporters, he didn’t blame the media, or the terrorists, or little green men in black helicopters.

I heard several people say that if McCain had made that speech (or ones like it) during the campaign, he could have won. What was his assessment?

“We fought as hard as we could. And though we fell short, the failure is mine, not yours.”

— Jim Gaines is the government reporter at the Daily News, and was identified by a losing candidate as a “card-carrying member of the drive-by media elite.”