John Hawkins, creator of Right Wing News, complaining about how the Internet makes us all terrible partisans:

Back in 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas had a series of famous debates in which both men spoke for an hour and a half each. Today, only 10% of people on the net will even watch an entertaining five-minute video all the way through. That’s problematic for our society because there are quite a few issues that simply cannot be adequately boiled down to a single slogan or sentence.

Even more telling, their debates were only streamed live over RealPlayer, which, I mean, really.  Come on.

Speaking for an hour and a half does not mean that people actually listened to you speak for an hour and a half.  Especially when 99.9% of the American public was not there and could have only vaguely heard about it days later, right before they saw a public listing for free cabbage down at the train depot.