Monday, December 03, 2007

Despite the blathering about the Clinton supporter's question, the truth about last Wednesday's CNN/YouTube debate was how unfairly the questions tilted toward the socially conservative right wing and other ideologically hard-line "movement conservative" issues -- just to take the most prominent example, the debate spent an inordinate amount of time on illegal immigration. I don't know how much of this bias stemmed from the submitted questions, or from CNN producers' assumptions about what Republican voters care about, but I do know that the effect was tough on John McCain, who is the devil incarnate to most of those movement conservatives. He is especially hated by rabid anti-taxer Grover Norquist, whose question on a no-tax-raises pledge was aired in that debate.

This evening, McCain did an MTV/MySpace "Presidential Dialogue" at Southern New Hampshire University, which I just finished watching. McCain noted toward the end of the hour-long forum that the questions -- which came from students at the forum, live text-messagers, and a popular-vote-winning video submission -- were a whole lot better than the ones in last week's event. He was absolutely right.

The questions touched on global warming, public schools, higher-ed affordability, health care costs, Darfur, Iraq strategy, stem-cell research, use of torture, bipartisanship, etc. These are issues of serious interest to most Republicans, not to mention independents who might vote in open primaries (like in NH).

McCain does very well on most of these, and the instant on-line feedback polling, for what it's worth, showed dramatic positive response by the end of the hour. He also gave an actually stirring call at the end for young Americans to participate in politics and in service to something "greater than your own self-interest."

McCain is thus far the only Republican contender to submit himself to the MTV/MySpace forum (John Edwards and Barack Obama have done it among the Democrats) and you can see why the others haven't. Either they should, or -- and I never thought I'd be caught saying this -- the major news organizations need to take a lesson from MTV.