I’d never call Michael Moore a reporter, he’s certainly not a journalist and there’s no way I’d describe his work as “fair and balanced” – except in that opposite-of-reality sense Fox News uses it.

His working-class-hero personna is, I think, a phony pose he has cultivated as a vehicle for effective storytelling. In the two Moore films and old “TV Nation” segments I’ve seen, it’s not hard to find ridicule of some of the same working people for whom he claims to have such profound respect. And a New Yorker profile published earlier this year found a fair number of former colleagues whose memories of working with him were considerably less than fond.

So if Moore’s not a truth sayer and he’s not the kind of guy you’d want to be your friend, boss, role model or guru, what is he?

A brilliant filmmaker. And – in a related development, as they say – the embodiment of a great American archetype: the huckster, the manipulator, the self-aggrandizer. He knows marketing and promotion.

Moore’s newest effort, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” is neither short-form news nor long-form documentary; it is an immensely entertaining nonfiction movie about, of all things, contemporary American foreign policy, economic philosophy and domestic politics. It is funny in a carefree, slaughter-the-sacred-cows kind of way; gut-wrenching in its stark depictions of the casualties of war; and infuriating – as injustices and needless destruction inevitably are.

In other words, “Fahrenheit 9/11” does what good films are supposed to do: It engages viewers’ emotions. It also generated more money in box-office receipts, in just its first weekend in theaters, than any previous nonfiction picture has earned.

But again, it’s a movie – it’s art, not science – and anyone who leaves the theater believing he has witnessed absolute revealed truth is simply a fool.

Facts are the raw material of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” but Moore chooses – as is his right – what to include, what to leave out, what to elevate to importance, what to squash to insignificance and how to connect the dots to create the impressions he wants to convey.

Moore can claim that the sum of his factual parts represents truth, but he cannot claim it as an exclusive. It is a truth. It may be the most compelling truth. But it is neither the whole truth nor the only truth.

Moore is very good at this work. Marrying telecast footage with news and feature outtakes and a slyly mocking narration, Moore gleefully shows President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft as complete dolts. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney come across as smug, condescending and contemptuous.

The film’s most inflammatory sequences – accusations that the Bush family and its acolytes took America to war because of common financial interests with the royal family and the bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia – is Moore playing the masterful insinuator.

Correlation becomes causation mainly on his say-so. He transforms assorted business deals involving some family members, agents and hangers-on into supposed drop-dead proof, sprinkling the stew with just enough reasonable questions (Why DIDN’T the FBI question bin Laden family members before letting them fly out of the country just after Sept. 11?) to lend credibility to the outrageous hypothesis.

Prior to the film’s general release, Moore also reaffirmed his genius for hype. His public conflict with the Walt Disney Co. over distribution of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” for example – something he had known about for a year – was staged/managed in perfect synch with its screening at the Cannes Film Festival. The film wound up winning the festival’s highest honor, the Palme d’Or.

And Moore has provoked furious conservative activists and the right-wing media machine into providing priceless free publicity for “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Every one of the attacks on the movie magnifies and amplifies public awareness of it far beyond the capacity of any paid ad campaign.

That this could come back to haunt Bush supporters in November is no fantasy.

Other than stoking their already heated passions, “Fahrenheit 9/11” isn’t going to change any hearts and minds in the pro-Bush and anti-Bush camps. Rather, the film’s potential political impact lies with undecided voters and, for that matter, people who haven’t even decided whether to vote at all. If these folks are moved to see the movie, the experience is far more likely to push them toward the Democrats than toward the Republicans.

It might not take much of that kind of movement to produce regime change in Washington. In the 2000 presidential election, a shift of 40,000 votes out of the 2.4 million cast in Missouri would have given the state to Al Gore instead of Bush. In Ohio, about 82,000 different votes out of 4.7 million would have done the same thing. And in Florida, if just 269 Bush votes had been Gore votes, out of the 6 million votes cast there, a different man would have sworn the oath of office as president Jan. 20, 2001.

All this puts Michael Moore – jerk, phony, exceptional filmmaker – in an extraordinary position: He has created a work of art, a work of commerce and a work of propaganda that may help change the course of history.

Eric Mink is commentary editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.