Note to Elizabeth Edwards: Your Husband Just Isn’t That Interesting

James Joyner reads the New York Times, apparently, so that you don’t have to. This morning, he notes:

Elizabeth Edwards, who despite no public policy credentials other than having been married to a one-term senator and yet oddly seems to get op-ed space in the major papers whenever she requests it, has a rather strange editorial in today’s NYT whining about how the mainstream media is failing in its duty to inform the public.

The first several paragraphs make the silly argument that the press covers only the drama of the race and ignores the issues, with the effect that “voters who take their responsibility to be informed seriously enough to search out information about the candidates are finding it harder and harder to do so, particularly if they do not have access to the Internet.” This, frankly, is nonsense. There’s so much information out there that it’s virtually impossible for those who can’t devote full time to immersing themselves in it to read it all. And who are these people who are simultaneously starving for information about Joe Biden’s health care proposals and yet lack Internet access? Presumably, there are people who are poor and don’t work in a connected office who are interested in public policy. But there’s always the public library.

Interspersed in this is a more interesting, if not particularly novel, complaint: That the press decides who the legitimate candidates are.

Look, let’s be honest enough to note that her biggest (mostly unspoken) implication was that were the press to have done it’s job, of, in her view, “focusing on the substance”, “I feel pretty” would still be in the hunt for the White House. (I suppose it arguable that it would have been an improvement over who the Democrats ended up with)

What she (And her husband) fail to recognize is the rather obvious conclusion… that the substance Edwards and her Husband offer, simply put, isn’t gathering the interest of the electorate, and that if it wasn’t for what she considers divergences from the ‘real issues’, the voters wouldn’t have had any interest in her husband’s candidacy at all.