Thursday, July 26, 2007
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The Great YouTube Debate, Only on Townhall
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Posted by:
Patrick Ruffini at
9:35 PM
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I can see from Hugh's post that the Romney campaign has made its decision not to participate in the YouTube debate. You heard it here first! (Of course, I kid.)
While I can certainly appreciate the desire to avoid "set up" questions, it is intellectually dishonest to simultaneously attack the Democrats for running from Fox News while raising the red flag at agenda journalism in the form of CNN/YouTube. I couldn't agree more with what one of the Republican candidates said about this:
"Why is it that the Democrats wouldn't even go on Fox, but we Republicans are happy to sit there and have Chris Matthews of the Carter administration, former chief of staff to (ex-House speaker) Tip O'Neill? We're happy to sit there and have him dish questions to us, but they won't even go on Fox." That candidate? Mitt Romney.
For years, we have rightly derided the media's farcical defense of its "layers upon layers of fact checkers and editors." And yet that is what Hugh is asking to see more of. Yes -- the media "posed" questions via YouTube that they would never have actually asked themselves. That's what bloggers do everyday, isn't it?
Hugh says, "Go to all the networks and talk to all the journalists, yes" (but not YouTube users). But why should it matter if I am a journalist? Do we now believe that journalists are the fount of all knowledge and wisdom? Isn't the vigorous belief that they are manifestly not what the right-blogosphere was founded on? You know where I learned that? Hugh Hewitt's Blog: The Information Reformation That is Sweeping Our World.
It's not that we look old by rejecting this debate -- and that we do. It's that we look like CBS executives tut-tutting at the 2008 version of the pajama-clad bloggers that brought down Dan Rather, with their messiness and lack of editorial control.
Hugh also argues that "the format diminishes the importance of the presidency, at least as it was managed by CNN." The gripping fear of appearing "unpresidential" is what weighs heavily on the minds of the campaign's high commands. Okay, that sounds legitimate in theory. But we had a controlled experiment in that on Monday night. Did all the snowmen and music videos make Hillary Clinton appear "unpresidential?" I'm sorry, but I saw the same debate you did, and they didn't. The Democratic candidates proved themselves unfit to lead by the content of their answers, not by who was asking the questions. Arguably, Mitt's best moment in the first debate was when we took out that idiot questioner who asked what he hated about America. As commenter manfred put it in response to my earlier post:
I am not sure, though, that I agree that being President or running for President means you are too dignified for odd-ball questions. You are running to represent the people -- not to be king. I think we mystify the office too much already. He is not our superior -- he is our servant. He serves at OUR pleasure, and he should never forget that or get too big for his britches (or her, as the case may be in a bit more than a year). If a question strikes you as being silly, answer it with grace. It needn't be an embarrassing moment -- it can show what you are made of. I'm no CNN fan either, Hugh. I hope that now that the CNN/YouTube debate is for all intents and purposes dead, it can reconstituted as a Fox News/YouTube debate and scheduled at a time that is convenient for all the candidates.
But here's the difference between this and any ordinary debate. In an open source environment, both conservatives and liberals have an equal opportunity to shape the outcome. Concerned about loaded questions? Have the Republican National Committee and other conservative groups send emails to their massive lists encouraging submissions. State parties should set up video cameras at shopping malls in GOP base areas taking questions and uploading them. This can be a powerful galvanizing moment in bringing thousands more Republicans online. We would have been better as a party for having it in its full glory.
Some Republicans will look at their candidates pulling out and fall in line. But we need to look at the bigger picture here. The Republican Party faces a demographic and technological emergency in 2008. We are losing an entire generation of voters -- and once lost, it will be very, very, very hard to get them back. Refusing to engage them on their own terms, in their choice of media, won't help things.
More to the point, we already face a massive online fundraising gap that will only get worse as our attitude towards the medium morphs from indifference into outright hostility. I've worked at this stuff long enough to know that you get out of the Internet what you put in. I had hoped that things would get better with Hillary as the nominee, but with unforced errors like this, now I'm not so sure they will. By trying to maintain an unshakable aura of decorum, by avoiding a tough question or two, we may be winning a battle, but we are losing the war.
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