Sunday, November 23, 2003

"But few celebrities have worked as hard at pure tabloid notoriety, or built reputations so unsullied by accomplishment or circumspection." One of the nice things about living in Greensboro is that one almost never hears the words "Paris Hilton." The slutty celebutante is an avatar of Manhattan provincialism. That said, this takedown by John Leland is pretty damn sharp. 9:52:13 AM    comment []

The article on John Edwards in this morning's NYT mag shows how frustrating the multi-candidate "debate" format is for the participants. It's reasonably sympathetic to Edwards, but of course Al Sharpton gets off the best line, on the limitations the brief debate responses place on his rivals: "It's not like some of them were on the verge of brilliance and then somebody cut them off!'' 9:41:22 AM    comment []

"The secret of Howard Dean's success is that his high-tech campaign is not really about technology. It's the people, stupid." In this morning's newspaper column, the Cliffs Notes version of my Dean case study -- with special added editorial features! "The Internet isn't going to do much for an otherwise hopeless candidate. But for a viable contender, the Internet can be like Miracle-Gro for the grass roots.... ...What the volunteers are doing isn't revolutionary, but the way they are doing it is new. The essential block-and-tackling of a campaign has been made easy and inexpensive and ubiquitous by means of a handful of simple online tools... ...One reason that the technology works so well is that for most people it is close to invisible." 8:37:49 AM    comment []