He Can’t Get Started

Is John Edwards the Democratic version of John McCain? Four years ago, that would have been considered a favorable comparison. Not anymore. “Outside of McCain, no top-shelf presidential candidate had a more difficult first six months than Edwards did,” say the members of the NBC News political unit who put together the First Read blog for MSNBC.com. “He raised less than half what Clinton and Obama pulled in; his candidacy lacks some of the buzz and luster his first one did; and his campaign (with the stories about $400 haircuts and his work for a hedge fund) has lost control of his image.”

Would Edwards’s campaign be helped by a different debate format? Edwards’s wife, Elizabeth, says her husband wants to thin the roster of candidates during the overcrowded debates. Fewer debaters would equal more debate, Mrs. Edwards suggests. She writes in a post at the Democratic activist site MyDD.com:

John meant what he said in Iowa: he wants smaller groups (or longer debates) so that there can be an end to the notion that a candidate can skate through the debates with sound bite answers. Everyone has sixty seconds to explain their [health] care plan and John’s truly universal plan ends up sounding just like a “plan” to talk about health care. It does a disservice to the voters. Since no one (maybe not even the candidates’ spouses!) would watch a three hour debate, it seems more sensible to have a series of randomly constituted smaller groups.

Chris Suellentrop

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News Still Has the Blues

The real digital divide: Information inequality of the voluntary sort, not involuntary income inequality, is “[t]he new fault line of civic involvement,” says Princeton professor of politics and public affairs Markus Prior. The author of “Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections,” Prior writes on the op-ed page of The Washington Post:

The new fault line of civic involvement is between news junkies and entertainment fans. Entertainment fans are abandoning news and politics not because it has become harder to be involved but because they have decided to devote their time to content that promises greater immediate gratification. As a result, they learn less about politics and are less likely to vote at a time when news junkies are becoming even more engaged. Unlike most forms of inequality, this rising divergence in political involvement is a result of voluntary consumption decisions. Making sure everybody has access to media won’t fix the problem — it is exactly the cause.

“Decades into the ‘information age,’ the public is as uninformed as before the rise of cable television and the Internet,” Prior writes. He adds, “Unfortunately for a political system that benefits from an informed citizenry, few people really like the news.”

Even though there are fewer readers and viewers of news than ever, aggregate news consumption hasn’t decreased, Prior says, because of the rise of the “news junkie.” (That’s you, Opinionator readers.) Prior explains:

A relatively small segment of the population — my own research indicates it’s less than a fifth — specializes in news content. But such people consume so much of it that the total amount of time Americans spend watching, reading and listening to news has not declined even though many people have tuned out.

Chris Suellentrop