by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
I hope everyone will forgive another round of soul searching on the function of the blogosphere. When we last looked at the state of Presidential campaign blogging three weeks ago, we saw that both partisan and intra-party attacks generated significantly more coverage than any other news events. No speech or public statement by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John Edwards warranted as much attention as the David Geffen-induced spat between Clinton & Obama staffers, which the candidates largely ignored (except for Obama publicly chiding his campaign) or Amanda Marcotte's firing. Nothing any candidate said about Iraq, Iran, economic inequality, or health care mattered more than whether Joe Biden used the words "clean" and "articulate" in a situation where they might be construed as racially insensitive (and very little mention of Biden's civil rights record came up in these posts). And this was during a time when Obama made his first public statement supporting universal health care as a goal for the next presidential term, and Hillary's campaign events frequently featured voters asking her to apologize for voting for the Iraq war, or to say it was a mistake.
Today, the story is much the same. Ann Coulter's CPAC outburst against Edwards, followed by Edwards being the first to decline an invitation to Fox's debate, generated far more coverage than, say, his March 15th speech in Manchester—a speech that was a great return to '07 or '03 vintage Edwards, but generate no sizeable amount of coverage (Neil's valiant efforts notwithstanding). The end of the Fox News debate included a lengthy post by Markos himself (!!) which does nothing but declare campaign winners and losers. The only hard news event to generate a sizeable amount of coverage was the Al Gonzales meltdown, which let Clinton put her name in the paper alongside calls for his resignation.
