I've wondered why Salon.com had become boring, why I seldom came to the site and when I did I seldom wanted to read an article and was more likely to go over to Slate, which, when I first read and then first subscribed to Salon thought was a distant and pallid competitor. Why am I considering not renewing?

Was it the absence of the high drama of the invasion of Iraq and the 2004 election? Was it the absence of peppery columnists like Camille Paglia? Was it the absence of interesting links? Probably these all contribute, but today I see there are a number of articles described so as to attract my interest. Why, despite that fact, do I find the magazine deadly dull? I suspect it may not be content, although I can't be sure because I'm seldom led into the content.

It's the new front-page format. The horizontal orientation, the drip-drip-drip repetitive treatment of headlines and descriptive matter, the floating of this scroll of headlines essentially on a sea of nothingness, the next-to-pastel color treatment and its monotony, the failure to allow the viewer to see at a glance or two something that will lead him/her to open up the magazine and possibly immediately set up a mental priority list of a number of articles to go to.

Marshall McLuhan got at the usefulness of the "buffet table" (my term, not his) appeal of the newspaper front page in a "Mechanical Bride" essay.

Please rethink (and re-do) your front page format.

Please keep Camille Paglia. Her spice is one of the elements that attracted me to Salon, and I've missed her (Tom Tomorrow can't take up all that slack, and Garrison Keillor, to risk a mixed metaphor, is weak medicine). She is like the clowns serving to break up the melodrama of circus.

I take the opposite side from her in the matter of climate change, but I would hate for storm-trooping political correctionists to drive her away from your pages.

Her polymathic presumptiveness may alienate some, but I can dismiss it and just luxuriate in her directness and fluency, sometimes disagreeing or simply befuddled.

OBAMA:"...he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

WALSH:"So while it's true he never said he "admired" Reagan, he certainly praised Reagan's campaign for its "optimism," "dynamism," "entrepreneurship," and "accountability."

Obama did not directly praise anything other than the Reagan campaign as appealing to what the "people" were "feeling." He made clumsy use of "we" to refer to the people at that time, not to himself as a "royal 'we.'" That is patently clear in the language "what people were already feeling, which was WE want clarity, etc. In other words the electorate was "praising" Reagan for giving them what they wanted. Obama was just a reporter.

What Obama has been trying to do is characterize himself as a "transformational" politician as was Reagan. albeit with another set of principles and goals (not fully outlined to say the least). To see the Clintons trying to portray him as a closet hyperconservative is contemptible, and it is discouraging to see Joan Walsh apparently blind to the meaning of these somehow controversial words and furthering the Clinton sliming.

It is peculiar and distressing to see Obama, so fluent in prepared speeches, stumble and stutter in converstaion and debate, eventually coming up with clumsy phrases such as that in contention here.

I have never read a more noxious overwritten piece on Salon or any other website I frequent.

Please put any further efforts like this in a clearly labeled "Failed Humor by Aspiring Verbal Athlete" section.

I stopped with Page One of the 3-page article.

Editors, please keep Salon adult.

"But if Obama were a white junior senator from Illinois with the same impressive personal and professional qualities -- the same intelligence, empathy, speaking skills, legislative tenure and life story -- there'd be no way he'd have the name recognition to mount a major campaign in the first place."

Even if he'd delivered a riveting keynote address at the last national party convention?

Also, although "blackness" or being African-American contributes importantly to his appeal, there is also the factor of his cosmopolitanism to consider: Kenya, Indonesia, polyglot Hawaii, the streets of Chicago as an organizer, Southern California and New York City schooling as well as the Harvard Law experience, professor at a top law school, best-selling author, at home on a basketball court, black wife, white mother, part-Asian sister, barefoot illiterate grandmother in a remote African village.

And, now that he is a candidate, also appealing is his closeness to the economic experience of ordinary Americans, relative to other candidates, only recently paying off his and his wife's student loans, and able to buy a comfortable home thanks only to writing two best-selling books