Questions from the "Audience" Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

I'm all with Matt.  So many stupid questions from Wolf Blitzer.    The most irritating part for me was the questions from the "audience."  They were actually good questions, but then Suzanne Malveaux would just take them and twist them into the same old tired recycled gibberish. 

FRANK PERCONTE: ...So my question to you is, assuming you are elected, the day after you take the oath of office, what message will you offer the whole country, to unite all of us behind you, so that you can see us through this period of transition that we're in? (Applause.)

MS. MALVEAUX: I'd like to refer that to Senator Obama.

Senator Obama, you said on a TV interview just this past weekend, you didn't believe that Senator Clinton was able to unite this country. Why do you believe she can't?

SEN. OBAMA: No, that's not what I said. What I said was I thought I could do it better. That's why I'm running for president. (Applause.) If I didn't think I could do it better then I wouldn't be running for president, because the stakes are too high, just as we heard.

Just like that a question about how would you unite the country becomes a question about attacking another candidate.  If you are going to go through the charade of having "questions from the audience," you should let them ask the questions.

Comments

[Don Bacon]

Come on, politicians are noted for evading questions and answering with a rote statement of their position on the subject. Obama passed up a golden opportunity to answer the first question with a positive statement on how he would unite the country, and instead he got into the mud-slinging that Clinton has criticized her opponents for.

In this exchange, the senator has forsaken "The Audacity of Hope" for the banality of politics with his "that's not what I said" and no response to the primary question, which was a good one. How would Obama unite Americans? From this exchange, we don't know.

[Brandon]

Don, who the heck is your candidate? Ilan makes an important point about how the major media outlets (in this case CNN) are shamelessly ignoring the will of the people and instead cheaply goading these campaigns to take pot shots at one another, and because he makes the point by citing Malveaux turning a perfectly good question inside-out and lobbing it to Obama, you decide to slam Obama. One thread back here, you slam Joe Biden for his foreign policy when he's the only candidate who actually has elaborated on one. If you want your criticism to be constructive, or instructive, why not show the contrast between them and your candidate, who must surely be the one perfect human being in our world? If you don't, I hope people can see your wet-blanket posts for the misanthropy it is. It was just this sort of pessimistic buckshot, digging into Al Gore and John Kerry for no good reason, suggesting there was no difference between the parties and nothing presidential or honest about those men that got us the travesty of everything America stands for—and everything he claimed to stand for—that is George W. Bush. Seems a little hypocritical to be dissing others for banality, mud-slinging, and inspecificity.

Incidentally, a day or two later CNN had a feature about the "Zings" of the campaign, presenting a clip from the debate and then commentating in that cloying way they have of pigeonholing some sound bite as if it's worthy of comment and then mocking it. The "zing" I caught? Hillary Clinton's comment that she was wearing an asbestos pantsuit. "Zing!" sang the commentator. It's not a zing, it's a fairly well-crafted if not riotously funny quip. Again CNN gets it wrong, then makes it sound like it's someone else's fault. (Not unlike the way they continually blame the Senate for our going to war in Iraq.) I didn't stick around long enough to catch another of CNN's ill-advisedly inferred "Zings" but this can't be good for CNN's legitimacy or the candidates'. When there's a good "zing"—say, Lloyd Bentsen's refusal to let whatshisname get away with likening himself to Kennedy—the media will and should eat it up. In the aforementioned Biden thread Don Bacon referred to "pap"—pap is what CNN is feeding its viewers (and how it is shaping the conversation) by regurgitating these non-nutritive bites it their cutesy way, especially when there were some presidentially relevant points made, notably by "my" candidate, Joe Biden, if I may say.

Here's something to add to Ilan's point...was it surreal to you or anyone else, as it was to me, that as the candidates stood onstage behind him, Blitzer approached the camera and asked his offsite commentators some variation on "So what can we expect to see from the major candidates tonight?" Tedious and limiting and obvious a question as it may be in the days and hours leading up to such a debate on a 24-hour-a-day news channel (48-hour-a-day channel if you count their "Headline News") it was absurd and not a little off-putting to hear it seconds before he whirled around and led the candidates through their paces so that it might be precisely as predicted. What is it he thinks we see him to be blitzing but substance and democracy and the dignity of the future leader of the free world, as it has been called, by (mis-)leading such a satire of a debate?

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