MegaAwesome

I missed the debate yesterday, though missed might not be the right word. If you’re especially curious here’s ElectionCentral’s roundup and the highlight reel assembled by TPMtv:

More on debating in general below.

I understand Obama’s decision to back away from future debates, as I think we’ve started reaching the limit of what can be accomplished by having all these folks lined up next to one another and getting thirty seconds at a time.

I do hope that he changes his mind about the forums, though. I really liked the LOGO forum and I hope to see more of those in the future. I hope that someone gets the good idea to combine the You-Tube questioning in a LOGO-like forum, I think that would be very interesting. The debates, though, can go. There’s always something interesting out of each one, but there’s also a whole lot of nothing and half-answered questions due to time restraints.

Ideally, I would like to see two forums about a week apart. At the first one each candidate would get a set amount of time and answer as many submitted questions as they could, maybe one in depth answer or ten quick answers. Then, a week later, the candidates would appear again and answer follow-up questions relevant to the answers that they had given a week before. Would that really be so difficult? In this day and age where it seems like everyone has a video camera in their pocket the candidates wouldn’t even have to be in the same state. They could get the list of questions via email, film their response, and post that up on the sponsor’s website. Instead of one debate after another, it could be one big debate over time.

It would be great, the first asymmetrical debate of the internet age. And any candidate who can’t participate due to time constraints shouldn’t be president anyway. If you can’t find an hour to film yourself answering questions that you get everyday, you don’t have it together enough to lead the world.

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