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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (763818)	7/25/2007 10:52:18 AM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 769670

Oh God Reno ?? The worse AG ever

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (763818)	7/26/2007 12:32:03 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769670

Debating YouTube By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY \| Posted Tuesday, July 24, 2007 4:20 PM PT Election 2008: After Democrats chickened out of hard questions from Fox News, it was heartening to see random queries from humble YouTube smoke out telling details about the party's candidates in Monday's debate. In the novel format, eight Democratic Party candidates took questions from viewers submitted through the free video medium of YouTube. It didn't fully expose candidates to voters, heaven forbid, because queries were filtered through CNN. But the questions at least were spontaneous and reflected a wider range of interests than the Beltway obsessions of the mainstream media. That freshened up the presidential campaign and strikingly revealed that, away from their handlers, the Democratic candidates are bigger amateurs than their potential voters. Not that it matters to someone like Joe Biden, who has little chance of getting elected. For him, the provocative questions from the public were his chance to draw attention to his otherwise neglected candidacy. Biden, who once told a voter he had a higher IQ, this time insulted a gun-toting YouTube questioner who asked about the Second Amendment. Biden got laughs, but he reinforced perceptions of a massive ego. Worse, he seemed clueless about Red State politics. For Barack Obama, the YouTube curveballs reinforced the idea that he's an inexperienced lightweight, something he'll have a harder time spinning away with the permanent record of the Internet. How, for instance, is he going to defend his response to a viewer who asked if he'd be willing to meet with the world's most odious dictators in his first year? With little idea what was at stake, Obama popped out an easy "yes" to please his questioner, but showed everyone else he didn't seem to know who Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad really were, and thus raised the specter that he could be rolled. (The dictators, after all, watched this too.) With most of the television media in Obama's tree, many moderators would have protected him from blundering on a question of that sort — but the YouTube public didn't, and the first-term Illinois senator paid the price. Hillary Clinton also got a question that media sophisticates would have laid off: whether she called herself a "liberal." Instead of spinning her image as a moderate, as her handlers have done, she offered an even worse answer by claiming to be a "progressive" — a term only a '60s radical would think a suitable sobriquet. Another impertinent question did in John Edwards. When asked what he didn't like about the candidate standing next to him (Clinton), he demurred at first, apparently not wanting to confront another candidate on real issues. Finally, he told voters he didn't especially care for the pink shade of Clinton's jacket. It only reinforced Edwards' popinjay image. For a candidate supposedly trying to shake that, the quick response reminded voters that primping seems to be Edwards' priority. To be fair, some responses from the Democratic candidates, such as Clinton's wary answer about not wanting to meet dictators, will probably improve voter perceptions. On the whole, however, the YouTube event showed the real amateurs were the politicians — who thought they knew it all — and not the public. Democrats, adept at dodging questions and spinning their message, are now in uncharted territory. As they blunder around, they're mostly reinforcing, not concealing, their real identities. We can only hope for more revealing YouTube-like events.