Warner 86: "Walter Lippmann in a way picked up on the odd nature of public address when he complained that no one could possibly be the sort of creature that is routinely addressed as the public of politics: the fully informed, universally interested and attentive, vigilat, potent, and decisive citizen. 'I have not happened to meet anybody, from the President of the United States to a professor of political science, who came anywhere near to embodying the accepted ideal of the sovereign and omnipotent citizen.'"
More from Lippmann: "We must assume as a theoretically fixed premise of popular government that normally men as members of a public will not be well informed, continuously interested, nonpartisan, creative or executive. We must assume that a public is inexpert in its curiosity, intermittent, that it discerns only gross distinctions, is slow to be aroused and quickly diverted; that, since it acts by aligning itself, it personalizes whatever it considers, and is interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict."
Warner 87: "Interestingly, Lippmann cannot observe his own advice. Even in writing this passage, he writes to an alert and thoughtful public ('we,' he calls it) with an assumption of activity."