Dispatch from Dave Weigel:
According to information from Nielsen BookScan, The Amateur has sold 137,000 copies, while Barack Obama: The Story has sold only 19,000.
The Amateur is eponymously titled. Ed Klein, the author, is a right-winging scandalmonger of pretentious seriousness and muckraking amateurishness. Barack Obama is another deeply researched, quality work by professional journalist and biographer David Maraniss.
Observes Weigel: "[T]he number of people who want their bitter views of Obama reinforced vastly outpaces the number who like Obama and want to understand him better." Which is another way of saying that works in intellectual crayon will beat the commercial pants off the responsible stuff every time. Roughly the same goes for campaigning and political advertising. The right, though, is naturally adapted to this primitive, knuckle-dragging environment, while the left mostly tsk-tsks the wretched injustice of it all.
Point, right.
The Harry Potter series has sold more 450,000,000 copies. What's their point?
Posted by: Robert Lipscomb | July 30, 2012 at 04:27 PM