Aw, I'm all touched. This is like that time they all gave Howard Dean a break for using a microphone in a crowded and noisy room. Oh, wait, that's not what they did at all.

It's not the record that hammers spontaneous politicians down, it's the commentators, like Matthew Dowd. They'll be as big a menace to spontaneity when they've succeeded in putting the new media under their control as they always have been as gatekeepers of the old.