When John Edwards’ political obituary is written, which could happen as soon as early next year, last week’s student-video incident may well be identified as the moment when everyone could see that the end was near. If an amateurish, obscure and eminently forgettable news report can unhinge your campaign staffers, it’s a good indication that there’s panic in the air at the Edwards camp.

You surely heard about this, but if not go here for a full recounting of the whole flap. The short version is this: A graduate journalism student at UNC-Chapel Hill produced a three-minute televised news report on the fact that Edwards’ campaign headquarters is located in an upscale shopping center. In the report, two UNC students earnestly debated whether that location was appropriate for a candidate who has made poverty a centerpiece campaign issue. The report was posted on Youtube, and that was that — until two top Edwards campaign staffers called UNC and demanded that the segment be killed.

Boy, you normally don’t see that kind of ham-fisted attempt at media manipulation anywhere this side of a FEMA press conference. Needless to say, the thuggery backfired on the Edwardians.

A confident, professional campaign would have ignored that amateur effort to gin up a controversy. It was, after all, old news. Ever since his first $400 haircut, Edwards has been swatting away similar questions about the gap between his high-cotton lifestyle and his concern for the poor. The student’s report on the location of the headquarters was just yet another variation on that theme, and one guaranteed to be largely ignored by the public. There was no benefit to Edwards in making a big deal about it. The only result was renewed attention to the dissonance between his affluence and his anti-poverty campaign.

But when you feel something slipping away, hysterics, irrational reactions and public displays of bad judgment are the norm. It’s what compels jilted lovers to stalk their former paramours, or give their cars the Carrie Underwood treatment. When people act hinky, it’s because they know their time is up.

Edwards will probably be done, politically, shortly after the New Hampshire primary. He’ll never run for president again unless he wants to be remembered as this generation’s Harold Stassen. Even if he wanted his Senate seat back, he probably couldn’t get elected again in North Carolina, considering how quickly he abandoned that post when presidential ambition first called in 2004. He might be a natural candidate for a cabinet post in a future Democratic administration — U.S. attorney general, for instance — but would Hillary Clinton really want to give a key post to someone with such a lean and hungry look?

Maybe Edwards will simply go back to practicing law. If so, the people with real reason to be annoyed with the young journalist would be doctors — Edwards’ favorite target in his litigator days.

Here’s what I learned yesterday: That if I want good service from Time Warner Cable, I need to pay more than the standard fee — which only gets me mediocre service.

It is a measure of my chronic naivete that I assumed all of Time Warner’s Web-access customers were equal in the eyes of God. I thought that when trouble arises, everyone is treated with the same regard. Silly me. It turns out that some of us are second-class citizens. We’re in steerage, and when the ship hits the iceberg the toffs get the lifeboats and we get scrap pieces of wood to cling to.

I know this because my online access hit the iceberg Monday morning. No amount of rebooting could get me back on the Web, so I called the customer-service number for help. First I spent twenty minutes on hold. Then I had a painfully protracted conversation with a computer-generated voice that would, for instance, instruct me to “say technical support” if I needed — you guessed it — tech support, only to then ask, “Did you say technical support” after I’d just said “technical support,” like it told me to. After that extended (and fruitless) who’s-on-first exercise, I finally got a human on the line. I told her that my computer was working fine and that the cable itself was working fine — I’d turned on the television to make sure — so by process of elimination, the problem had to be in the modem I’d been issued. She put me on hold, then came back to tell me my cable service was fine, so it must be the modem.

Me: Uh, yeah. That’s what I just said.

Her: We can have a service technician there between eight and noon Wednesday morning.

Me: That’s two days away. I work from home and I need online access.

Her: Maybe you should upgrade to business class, then.

Me: What would that get me? The modem would still be punking out on me, right?

Her: You’d get same-day service calls.

There is was. My woes were an opportunity for up-selling. We weren’t talking anymore about the faulty modem Time Warner had given me. We were talking about the great service I’d get if I paid Time Warner more money. Surely I would be happy to do that, now that I’d experienced the mediocre service. Who wouldn’t want good service?

There is a lesson in this for authors like me. We should consider offering two levels of books. The regular retail price would get you a book that has typographical errors, smudged ink, paragraphs out of order and key plot points mysteriously left out. If you bring the book back to the store and complain, you would be offered a premium edition of the same book. It would be flawlessly edited, gorgeously printed, and have all plot twists and turns intact. Who wouldn’t want that book, especially after you’ve suffered through the bad version?

In fact, authors should consider having Time Warner handle the production and distribution of those flawed books. It’s got a track record of mediocrity that’s hard to beat.

Here is a news story that ran recently in newspapers around the globe (mostly England and, for some reason, a bunch of papers in east Asia). I reprint here in its entirety:

London, Oct 25 — Most men in the UK believe that the girls most likely to have sex with them on the first date are the ones named Kelly.

Second on this list is the name Tanya, followed by Debs or Debbie at third place.

Fourth on the list of women most likely to sleep with men on their first date was the name Becky.

The list was rounded off by Steph at the fifth place.

The poll of 1,000 men was conducted for global research website OnePoll.com.

Spokesman John Sewell said that it showed that some names have certain connotations.

“It’s strange how certain names have connotations,” The Sun quoted him, as saying. “If guys have a good experience with a girl of a certain name, they tend to remember them. It’s bad news if your name is Kelly, though.”

Other names reckoned to be up for bedroom action include Michelle, Tina, Lisa and Carly.

If you haven’t seen this story before now, it’s almost surely because your local paper focuses on issues and policies and big-picture crap like that. Too bad for you. This is the kind of practical information which, if newspapers made more frequent use of it, could help pull the journalism industry out if its current decline. Who wouldn’t buy a newspaper that routinely had useful tips for getting action?

Grateful as I am for this information, though, I have to wonder: Who thinks up a poll subject like this? Are there people who actually get paid for coming up with bizarre sociological questions that can be posed to a random collection of 1,000 people? I have this image of an office where, on any given morning, one of the poll gurus bustles in and says, “OK, how ’bout this idea — let’s ask people what disgusting, vile thing they’d eat for a million bucks. We’ll give ‘em a dozen or so choices and see which one comes out on top.” A few months later, you open your morning paper and read about a survey revealing that 42 percent of the population would eat a bowl of baboon snot for a million dollars.

Except you won’t be able to read it, because that story wouldn’t be in your newspaper. Unless you lived in, say, Kuala Lampur — where women named Kelly are suddenly popular, I hear.