What a joke. You can go to Youtube and see what a (comparatively) crappy public speaker Lamont was in March of this year... and watch him field-testing messages and ideas. And he still beat the battle-tested incumbent's ass.
The issue here is that the insider crew plays a game where they "forget" the embarrassing things said by candidates they like. This racist Allen flap? Without video, there maybe would have been a page A13 note about a "he said-she said" debate over an insensitive remark -- and Allen's shallow remarks would have been enough to dismiss the story.
The rules are changing, and there's a very large class of people in the blogosphere who are "ultra high-information participants" that won't let omissions stand. The behind-the-scenes media politics that shapes what's allowed to be in the public record is being dissolved - if you don't put the information out there, you don't have credibility. And that's quite a positive development.
I think the traditional corporate media was surprised when their little tacit agreement to flush Stephen Colbert's amazing performance at the White House Correspondent's Dinner down the memory hole backfired when people using youtube.com and the Internet jimmied the plumbing and made the performance sit in the bowl for days for all to see (to prolong the metaphor) ;-)... That was their first major warning that something was amiss with their smug control of the moving image in this country ...
