Portrait Of The 40%

Bill Keller on the voters Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will need to win:

The middle is not the home of bland, split-the-difference politics, or a cult that worships bipartisan process for its own sake. Swing voters have views; they are just not views that all come from any one party’s menu. Researchers at Third Way, a Clintonian think tank, have assembled a pretty plausible composite profile of these up-for-grabs voters.

¶Swing voters tend to be fiscal conservatives, meaning they are profoundly worried about deficits and debt.

¶They are mostly economic moderates, meaning they are free-marketers but expect government to help provide the physical and intellectual infrastructure that creates opportunity.

¶They are aspirational — that is, they have nothing against the rich — but they don’t oppose tax increases.

¶They want the country well protected, but not throwing its weight around in the world.

¶They tend to be fairly progressive on social issues; they think, for example, that abortion should be discouraged but not prohibited.

It's Time To Make Readers Pay

Sometimes the smartest people in the world don't have a clue:

The editor of The New York Times has hinted that the newspaper might charge again for access to some of its online offerings, less than two years after abandoning fees to boost advertising revenue.

Hint? He should shout it from the rooftops. It's reckless for newspapers to remain complicit in the fradulent and self-defeating idea that quality editorial content should be free. If people don't want to pay to read the Times on line or on their Kindles, then they won't get to read the stories. Ditto the wire service copy available for free on Yahoo. News outlets should start charging now, while they still have enough muscle and depth behind their coverage so that readers really know what they're missing. At this point, the struggling industry has nothing to lose. Text isn't dead, but print is. If you think otherwise, you probably own a printing company.