From Scratch

It’s painful so far, just a few minutes into a ground-breaking experiment in which Democratic presidential candidates are answering questions from the citizenry, submitted via YouTube. (Why we, as a nation, continue to call what are essentially glorified news conferences “debates” is beyond me.)

Host Anderson Cooper flubbed his second sentence and another soon after. As the candidates stood, fresh-scrubbed and eager behind their podiums at The Citadel, CNN proceeded to show us — honest — several videos we would not be seeing. They even had a special little graphic for it: What You Won’t See or something. What we saw that we wouldn’t see included videos of people in costume and children asking about Social Security.

Hillary Clinton, in her first answer, worked in the fact she was First Lady and, in her second, said she considers herself to be a progressive, not a liberal. Nobody wanted to be tagged with the L word, although only three got to chime in before CNN scampered on to another question.

A guy from Maryland asked a good question: If you had to pick a Republican for a running mate, who would it be? Almost nobody got a chance to answer and John Edwards gave a true politician’s non-answer answer by saying “all” the questions (three or four at that point) seemed to be asking how would they change things.

It’s an interesting, if somewhat clumsy, experiment in democracy — even the candidates got to present 30-second videos —  and it’s the Republicans’ turn in September November to meld the Internet with politics. For more see Presidential Debates Coming on YouTube.

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Tags: political news