In the weeks leading up to the well-advertised CNN/YouTube GOP Presidential Debate, I was actually getting pretty excited. What a great way to merge modern technology and politics, and get lots of people, especially younger ones, engaged in the process. Recently I gave a keynote address at a Junior Statesmen of America conference, and they had a room set up so that high school students could record debate questions, and I must have seen a hundred e-mails cross my desk referencing the debate, and people sending around their video taped questions for others to see. There was a great deal of buzz, and, for me, a hightened level of expectation.
As it turns out, this debate was totally hijacked by the MSM — and I don’t know whether to blame CNN exclusively, or apply some of the bad credit to the folks at YouTube. That is because I am not sure who was responsible for sifting through the thousands of video clips of questions, and choosing which ones would be asked of the still-too-crowded field of candidates — but since we are talking about stereotyping the right here, let’s go ahead and "fit in" — we’ll blame Ted Turner’s CNN.
This debate was more or less ruined by the terrible choices made in which questions were asked to the candidates.
Of course, to the many reporters who read this website, most of you won’t get this because of your realized or unrealized liberal bias — but the questions that were asked in the debate, in many instances, fed into stereotyping of the GOP. You can also tell a lot by the questions that went unasked.
Here is my favorite example of using this debate to live out the political fantasies of a liberal CNN editor somewhere who wants to barb the GOP… It’s literally a question of the candidates, "Do you beleive every word of the Holy Bible?"
I like to think that if I were a candidate up there, at some point, I would have said, "Whoa… Cooper [Anderson]… Where are the questions about health care? How about the massive overspending in Washington? How about a question about whether candidates would use their veto pen more than this President? What about the egregious earmarks that are obliterating the confidence of Americans in the U.S. Congress?"
Instead of asking the candidates about the current obsession with reducing mankind’s emission of carbon into the atmosphere, we were treated to not one, not two, but three questions on gun ownership issues. They couldn’t resist bringing Jesus Christ into the debate. Or how about every liberal’s favorite question since they all hate Dick Cheney?
Let me chime in that I did enjoy the debate from a political theatre point of view, and there were some very good questions in the mix. Still, because of the potential for the event, and my elevated level of expectation, I came away quite disappointed.
At the end of the day, allowing liberals at CNN to sift through 5,000 video questions, picking out the ones they wanted… really negatively impacted the quality of the debate, and I believe made it a much less useful tool for GOP primary voters than it otherwise may have been.
You can see all of the video questions and candidate answers, courtesy of YouTube, here. Also, there is a dust-up about one of the questions actually being asked by a public Hillary supporter, which you can read about here.