Sommer’s got a Variety subscription and informs us that despite the blog hype and the Gilmore Girls lead-in, Veronica Mars still gets very bad ratings. Equally, as she says, what we’re basically seeing here is that advertiser-based television has a very hard time serving as a home for high quality programming. On HBO, the name of the game is that some people need to like the shows enough to be willing to pay to watch them. On conventional television networks, you need a larger audience and there are fewer rewards to instilling high levels of audience loyalty.

The good news, I think, is that the future will almost certainly involve more fee-for-service programming, which means more good programming. Not necessarily in the form of more subscription-based networks like HBO. Rather, newer technologies (iTunes store, OnDemand, etc.) let people sell individual episodes or subscriptions to particular shows more-or-less directly to the audience. That’s the kind of situation where, in principle, you could make a shitload of money from a loyal audience even if the audience wasn’t huge. The “bad” ratings for the Veronica Mars premiere, for example, actually included approximately 3.3 million viewers. If you could get, say, half of those people to pay $1 per episode you could earn tens of millios of dollars. And I bet you could get half of them to pay $1 per episode to watch the show. Certainly I would.

All decent people, in my experience, know that the West ought to take military action against the government of Sudan in order to halt the killings in Darfur. Unfortunately, to the best of my (admittedly limited) ability to figure out, such an intervention would actually be a very bad idea. See Alex de Waal and Brad Plumer on this. The fact that intervention advocates like Eric Reeves seem to mostly be assuming that an intervention force wouldn’t actually need to fight — i.e., that the Sudanese would surrender — strikes me as cause for concern; a classic instance of best-case scenario planning.

Kurt Campbell and Michael O’Hanlon point out that perceptions of which party is good for national security switch around over time, typically in response to events. The current dissilusionment with the wreck Bush has made of things, in other words, offers up a chance for Democrats to shift around the post-Vietnam perception that they’re worse on these things for the long-term. But to seize advantage of the opportunity, Democrats need to try, and outline “the kind of idea-driven agenda, and confident preoccupation with matters of national security that has generally been conceded to the GOP in recent decades.”

I’m not sure exactly what Campbell and O’Hanlon have in mind, but their general take on this quite right. I would particularly emphasize the confident preoccupation point. One of the GOP’s great strengths on the politics of national security over the past five years has, I think, simply been confidence. They act like they expect to win national security debates, and that helps them to win them. Democrats, by contrast, have mostly looked very defensive, a trend that’s waned somewhat but still persist to a remarkable degree. But at this point, absolutely everybody can tell that Bush’s policies have been a disaster. The first step to securing public faith in a Democratic alternative is simply to say that confidently and without self-consciousness.