Mark Weiner / The Post-Standard

Each time I write something about Americans Elect/Buddy Roemer I get the question, "Why?"
It's a fair questions so here is my answer.
I started writing about Americans Elect around Thanksgiving. Roemer was already prominently mentioned on their website, which I thought was interesting and made what they were doing of some local interest. Since then, Americans Elect has gotten a fair amount of national press, mostly either building it up or knocking it down - generally a news organization would do first one, then the other - but paying almost no attention to the mechanics of it and how it was actually being managed and playing out. By default, the Times-Picayune became the only mainstream news organization giving it any consistent attention. Perhaps it's overkill, but Americans Elect is a $35 million undertaking with a lot of well-known benefactors that, unlikely as it is, may yet put a candidate for president on the ballot in every state, and I think it's good that even if no on else cares, at least Americans Elect knows there is someone watching what it does and how it does it, and there is some permanent record of what happened as it was happening. And, if it comes to nothing, I think it's still interesting to follow how something with such high ambitions and ample resources failed.
Finally, most of what I have written has been Web-only, so very few trees were killed covering Americans Elect. In fact, this is an example of the advantage an on-line site offers to provide more detailed/obsessive coverage of an issue than the newspaper has room for or most people have interest in reading, but that may prove valuable to some readers and posterity.