YouDebate!

I just sat in on a conference call with CNN and and YouTube, who are teaming up on what they are calling the “first-ever viewer-generated presidential debates.” The debates (one with the Democrats on July 23, one with the GOP on Sept. 17) will feature questions taken entirely from the public’s online video submissions, which can be submitted starting today at YouTube.

Trend-chasing stunt or genuine contribution to the public arena? Well, the former, of course, but that doesn’t mean it can’t also be the latter. On the one hand, this could become a replay of the “town hall” debate trend we saw starting in 1992, which brought out some interesting questions, but also resulted in an inordinate focus on candidates’ knowing the price of a gallon of milk.

But on the other hand, can the questions be any worse than Wolf Blitzer’s grandstanding, “Please raise your hands” interrogations or Chris Matthews’ hectoring? (Though in the conference, Micah Sifry asked the good question of why the questions aren’t being voted on by YouTubers rather than selected by the debate organizers, and didn’t get an especially good answer.) We’ll have to see whether adding video to viewer questions will affect the quality of the questions, but they should at least make them more telegenic.

All I know for sure is that I need to hear Barack Obama respond to this:

David Baty

For what it’s worth, the first GOP primary debate sponsored by MSNBC and The Politico was supposed to have a voting system that would ensure the candidates get the top voted user-submitted questions on The Politico asked to them. None of the top vote-getters ended up being used. There were user-submitted questions asked but they were not among the ones that received the most votes and were, instead, selected by the organizing committee.

No real surprise, but quite disappointing. I would suspect this CNN/YouTube debate to be the same sham; although I wouldn’t mind being surprised.
p_lukasiak

without allowing the audience to select the questions, this really is just a stunt — and a stupid one at that.

As David noted above, the debate run by the politico was supposed to include the “winning” questions — and one of the Democratic presidential candidates (IIRC, Edwards) submitted a substantive question that wound up being the NUMBER ONE vote getter — and was ignored.

Personally, I think that there should be at least one debate where there is a panel of progressive bloggers asking the questions. These are among the most knowledgeable people on the planet in terms of the candidates and the issues that are important to Democrats, and can be expected to ask serious incisive questions of them.

BUt this “look mom, I’m on TV” stuff is sheer nonsense — especially when the people picking which questions will be asked will be more concerned with the visual/audio elements of the submissions than with the content of the questions themselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiullH5jU1A Something Obama would have trouble with

Here’s one of the questions I submitted to Politico; compare it to the fluffballs that were asked, bearing in mind I was limited to 255 characters:

“Some of the immigration marches were organized by Mexican political parties and those linked to the Mex. government. Will you push Congress to investigate what role if any the Mex. government played in agitating their citizens to take to our streets?”

Here’s another one:

“Won’t millions of people see the fines associated with legalization as a tremendous deal compared to the benefits? Won’t they respond by coming here illegally? Won’t those pushing for legalization now work to weaken its enforcement provisions later?”

Based on the generally fluffy questions Youtube has asked of the candidates in their interviews and based on the debates to date, I’m not expecting either Youtube or the organizers to select my type of questions. Don’t want to cause any embarrasment or anything.

Here’s a better way to conduct debates:

http://www.petitiononline.com/debateit/

And, along those lines, my name’s link has a much more important issue Obama might want to address.
p_lukasiak

wow James… its not very often that you manage to attract GOP trolls here! (I blame ana-marie, of course, for linking to this post.)