The next two nights will obviously tell the tale — whether there will be a bounce or not, whether the Biden choice has been helpful, whether Obama can recapture the magic and propel his general-election candidacy forward. What we don’t know is whether the wasted effect of the convention’s first two nights are really due to a failure on the part of the Democrats or whether the conventions are now simply too long, that the public is uninterested in them until the actual players speak, and that therefore the Monday and Tuesday nights are, from the perspective of public opinion, of no use whatever. If that is the case, and I suspect what happens next week with the Republican convention will demonstrate that it is, the parties will have to think long and hard in 2012 about whether they want to sell the conventions as four-day television shows or whether they want to use the first two days as a means solely of rallying party officials gathered in the convention city and then go all out on the last two days. In this scenario, they wouldn’t seek network coverage except on Wednesday and Thursday, and might therefore get 90 minutes to 2 hours in a block out of the nets instead of the too-compressed hour.