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By The Hill Editors
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Posted: 07/25/07 07:15 PM [ET] |
CNN’s website reported Monday night’s Democratic presidential face-off under the headline, “Snowman, lesbians, bubbas steal debate.” When visitors to CNN’s site clicked to go to the story, the subhead was, “Questions, not answers, highlight YouTube debate.”
The headline-writer hit the mark: Monday’s event had little to do, or should have had little to do, with choosing the next president; it was much more about the debut of a new format. The message was almost entirely about the medium, which used 39 of some 3,000 video questions posted by voters.
No candidate hit a knockout blow, but Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) landed a heavy glove on her chief rival Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) for his no-caveats assertion that he’d meet Fidel Castro, Cuba’s dictator, and other enemies of America within his first year as president.
The Drudge Report ran an online poll in which 41 percent of respondents said Obama won the debate. His closest rivals, each trailing with just 13 percent, were Clinton and no-hoper Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio). But the poll served only to underline the point above — this was not a debate about who will be the next president and almost entirely about the medium.
Obama won the poll (and by such a wide margin) not, assuredly, because he was far and away the most impressive candidate on the night but because he has more supporters and “friends” among the tech-savvy liberals most excited by the vlogger culture of the event. This is serving him well in the primary and will continue to do so, perhaps even to the door of the White House. But his lopsided win was, again, as much or more about the medium as anything else.
In a democracy, one vote is as valid as any other, and it’s OK for voters to pick their champion for any reason they wish, whether it’s a policy issue or the color of the candidate’s eyes; democracies are opinion markets that, if allowed to function freely, focus power on concerns uppermost in citizens’ minds, however serious or trivial they may be.
But accepting this is not the same as saying all questions are equally good or even marginally helpful in assessing candidates. When Melissa, of San Luis Obispo, Calif., who perhaps skipped high school civics classes, asked, “If I can go out into any state and get the same triple-grande, nonfat, no-foam vanilla latte from Starbucks, why can’t I go to any state and vote the same way?” the sensible answer would have been, “Because federal and state constitutions don’t cover the sale of coffee.” |
