Dean talks to hispanics; Edwards fails to

The John Edwards campaign has five entries in its blog RSS feed at the moment (headlines only, unfortunately). In chronological order, from oldest to newest:

• Open Thread: Tu Experencia. It says “View and Post comments here / Escriben y vean los comentarios aqui.” At time of posting, nobody has.

• Open Thread: Tu Experencia (a repeat). Nothing here either.

• Bienvenido al Blog Para la Comunidad Latina/Hispana!. It reads “Esta pagina es para hablar de temas que afecta la comunidad Hispana/Latina. Se puede usar inglés y español en esta página. We welcome both Spanish and English speakers on this site.”
  Forgive me for having spent two unhappy years doing Spanish as a third/fourth (I’m bilingual) language in France, but it seems to me that their translation is wonky. To me, it means “This page is about talking about [themes/issues?] that are important to the Hispanic/Latina Community. You can use either Spanish or English on this page.” Not quite the same.
  The ambiguity is still complete, because nobody commented.

  Oh, and Spanish has an inverted exclamation mark (¡) before exclamative phrases, you dolts. Why does it take a Périgueux- (Dordogne, France) and Glasgow- (Scotland, UK) educated Brit to tell Southerners how to speak to Southerners?

• On 25th November, the day after the Iowa debate, which John Edwards took part in, the Edwards Blog talked about the 21st November Jefferson Jackson Dinner. The campaign blog didn’t give a link to the original source material, so we didn’t know whether the pro-Edwards quotes were out of context. But hey - 5 Edwards supporters had posted when I checked, and that’s got to count for something, right?

• Finally, Elizabeth Edwards says she feels good about the campaign. And this most recent post gets 9 10 comments at the time of writing (I expect there to be more soon). I have a lot of time for Elizabeth Edwards - she was very kind and supportive when Howard Dean, his family, and his supporters learned about the cruel fate of Charlie Dean, and I’d like the rest of the campaign to be like her. But I can’t bring myself, as yet, to trust that her qualities permeate her husband’s campaign.

Compare this to the volume of comments posted on the Dean blog, and one conclusion is inescapable: people may be coming to the Edwards campaign website and blog, but they’re not participating. I don’t know whose fault that is, whether it’s to do with the website or whether it’s to do with the candidate’s message, but there’s a serious problem here that Edwards needs to solve if he’s going to be a convincing candidate.