YouTube Debates

Firstly for anyone that missed the debates last night, you can find all the questions and their responses at www.youtube.com/debates.

Last night the democratic candidates hung out with Anderson Cooper @ cnn and got their debate on. This is nothing new candidates have been debating in the public news forum for years, however this year the questions did not come from a panel of voters or a journalist. This year the people asking the questions were the users of youtube, and boy did they ask some tough ones. Here is the video the event opened with.



This video does a good job of setting the tone for most of the other questions asked through out the night. The questions were arranged in groups depending on their area of concern. Out of 3000 submissions 39 were chosen and shown. One video shows a man singing a song about taxes, while another shows an uninsured breast cancer patient asking politicians how they feel about her lack of insurance greatly decreasing her odds of survival. Even the religious community made it in on this one with a video that has a an African American Reverend asking candidates how they feel about religious beliefs and their place in politics(The reverend was against religion in politics.)

The best question of the night(IMO) was this one.



This question did a great job of showing that nothing about political debates has changed. The problem of political debates is two sided. The first being the nature of the questions, which with the advent of the youtube debates has been changed. The other issue is that politicians will flat out refuse to answer direct questions no matter how insignificant they may be. Out of all the candidates only 3 answered the entire question. John Edwards, Barrack Obama, and that one guy that made fun of the other dudes wife.

I find it very troubling that I live in a time where the people who lead my country cannot complete a social learning activity that 2nd graders have been able to breeze through since the words social learning activity existed.

Despite that rant I do want to give major props to Anderson Cooper, he did a very good job of not kissing everyone's ass and trying to make them stay on topic.