Upendra Shardanand

Scott Klein called my attention to Eugene Robinson's column, suggesting the McCain strategy is decrease the signal-to-noise ratio of this campaign: "Any day spent arguing about meaningless ephemera is a small but significant victory for a campaign that has nothing to say." Echoed in Politico:  “ 'Every day not talking about the economy, the war and how to fix a broken system is a victory for McCain,' said John Weaver, a former top strategist to the nominee who left the campaign last year. 'They’re going to ride it as long as they can and as long as the mainstream media puts up every ridiculous charge.' " The More Noise, Less Signal strategy has legs only as long the various media are a poor filter for the noise, or worse, are an amplifier for the noise being put out there, or even worse, start adding new noise. Clearly cable news is guilty as charged. When was the last time you saw a panel of 3 economists discussing the mortgage crisis, or 3 foreign policy and military experts discussing the war? Almost always a a panel of partisan political experts either adding noise, or discussing the impact of serious issues on the campaign - not dissecting the issues themselves. Where does print fall? Or the blogosphere? Does the sum total effect of the blogosphere serve to cut the noise and crank up the signal, or vice versa? Is the blog beast, effective, today, in keeping the campaigns honest, or is the net effect to make it more noisy? Thoughts? [It'd be an interesting experiment for someone to take the Daylife API and possibly do a quantitative analysis on this topic.]