In an excerpt from his new book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, Byron York details how Michael Moore worked to create the false impression that his film Fahrenheit 9/11 was triggering a wave of anti-Bush anger—when in truth, the appeal of Moore’s movie was limited to those who already hated Bush: Michael Moore and the Myth of Fahrenheit 9/11. (Hat tip: Joel.)

At least for a while, the plan appeared to be working. Fahrenheit 9/11 did an impressive business, earning far more than any other documentary in history. And many reporters and analysts, spurred on by Moore and his publicity team, interpreted the movie’s success as evidence of a deeply felt and growing anti-Bush sentiment among the public, not just in the blue states, where the movie might have been expected to do well, but also in the red states won by George W. Bush in 2000.

But a little more than four months later, after Election Day, things looked much different. Not only had Moore’s movie not propelled the Democratic candidate to victory, but some Democrats wondered privately whether Fahrenheit 9/11 and all the attendant fuss might have done more harm than good. What went wrong?

The answer, although no one beyond a few Hollywood executives, and probably Moore himself, knew it at the time, was that Fahrenheit 9/11 never had the sort of national appeal that its maker and its publicists claimed. The truth was just the opposite; deep inside the dense compilations of audience research figures that are used by movie studios to chart a film’s performance was evidence that Fahrenheit 9/11’s appeal was narrowly limited to those areas that were already solidly anti-Bush. Moore’s daily pronouncements about the movie’s success in pro-Bush areas, and the growing anti-Bush movement it was supposedly engendering, were little more than wishful thinking.