With her new song, "Party in the USA," it appears so.

The title "Party in the USA" makes explicit what the lyrics' Nashville-to-L.A. pilgrimage and Jay-Z and Britney name-drops suggest—this isn't a mere single so much as a red state/blue state, hick/elite, rural/urban détente. Pop bliss eradicates regionalism. (This point is built ingeniously into the music, too—when Cyrus repeats the words "and a Jay-Z song was on," it's hard to say whether her mildly robotic vibrato is nodding to country music, T-Pain, or both.)

"Party in the USA" pairs a familiar notion—music brings us together—with a more timely concern. After a summer in which anti-Obama crazies brought guns to town hall meetings and anti-government crazies may have lynched a census worker, in which calls from the left for the president to abandon bipartisanship intensified to a roar, Miley Cyrus has decided on her most ambitious arbitration yet: She wants to heal a fractured nation, at least for three and a half minutes.

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