YouTube marries CNN - debate update

My brush with CNN in the context of its media facilities New Hampshire Democratic debate has turned me into something of a CNN fan. Hence I was not surprised to see the news station recognising the Internet not only as a resource but as a media partner and creating the bright new phenomenon of a co-hosting arrangement with YouTube. In many ways, this was more significant than the South Carolina Democratic debate it embraced. It was media history.

Of course, a lot of secrecy and fuss surrounded the questions submitted to the Debate via you Tube. No one wanted to blow the pioneer partnership before the event - so the teasers told us of the quantities of questions submitted and the fact that they would be screened.
One has to note that YouTube now is a vibrant political playground. All the presidential candidates have posted video in YouTube and there is a mass of political satire and commentary available amid the piano-playing cats, pratfalls and teen showoffs on the video-sharing empire which, I may add, is only two years old and already is a household name which was sold to Google for something like $1.6 billion.

It is realistic to see YouTube as a player in the political progress - and a brilliant idea to encompass its global participating in the American political process.

It also made for a livelier and more interesting debate with video questions from all sorts of people all over the place.

So, the big and usual question: Who won the South Carolina Democratic debate?

Of course I am going to say Hillary did.
There in her vivid magenta in the line-up of besuited men, she was as much as visual stand-out as she was a political one.


The more of these debates they do, the more the New York Senator shines.
She never has to try. She is simply serene and authoritative, confident and ready.
One reads the ongoing polls and observes the public reticence which holds her back - the old baggage being carted around by those who are stuck in a time-warp of media negativity from the old Whitehouse days when she was cutting her teeth, so to speak. One by one, they come around as they have any direct contact with Hillary. That is all it takes. That is the transformative moment.

The other Democratic candidates realise this and are working hard to compete. It is a bit sad in some ways. They are an impressive lineup, exceptional politicians each and every one.

Barack Obama continues to breathe down Hillary's neck - and his media performance improves steadily.
He fronted well in the debate.
He did, however, look alarmingly thin. If he was lean and hungry before, he is a bit gaunt in front of the camera now. Not good. The stress showing? Perhaps he should have kept on smoking. I am disappointed that he caved in on the smoking thing.



John Edwards, as a Southerner, was in home territory in this debate and he was just as shiny and gorgeous as ever. A very telegenic man. He is handsome and comfortable in the medium and he fared well.

Very tellingly, both Edwards and Obama showed the face of their fear of Hillary by sniping at her and her policies. She sniped at no one.

Joe Biden always presents well in debate and he did so again in this one.


Bill Richardson, a particularly classy and worthy candidate, never seems to come over as well on the electronic media. He may be a better candidate than Biden, but he is always pipped on the television.
Chris Dodd seemed a bit stodgy - despite the airing of his own YouTube advertisement which is all about the qualifications of his thick head of white hair.

Mike Gavel might have been on the end of the line but he was in the forefront of the camera when it panned from the YouTube screen to the candidates - and he got a lot of visual prominence, if not so much in spoken word.
One of the reasons for the latter was the fairly peremptory way in which he answered the questions. He has taken gruff to the extreme. He is pouting and snarling like a rather jealous loser - which is a pity.

Dennis Kucinich is a regular loser in the presidential candidate stakes and he does the whole thing with panache and good spirit. He will never admit defeat - and he knows he has a lot of important egalitarian messages to convey and he will use the platform to keep the true left alive.

The more of these debates they do, the more obvious it becomes that there are really just the three runners - Clinton, Obama and Edwards, in that order.

And the debate verdict is...

There they stood behind their oddly tapering lecterns under the kitsch, over-arty red, white and blue MSNBC debate set - Hillary Clinton, the tiny one, Barack Obama, the tall one, and then John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Biden - and who the hell is that other fellow?

I'd never heard of Mike Gravel, the former senator from Alaska.
Well, we all know him now. The man who said he felt like a potplant perched at the edge of the lineup turned out to be the star of the debate. Talk about fresh blood and fresh perspective. He is an old-fashioned sage. A no-bull man! A realist.
Terrorism, he asserted, "has been with civilization from the beginning, and it will be there till the end. We're going to be as successful fighting terrorism as we are fighting drugs with the war. It doesn't work. What you have to do is to begin to change the whole foreign policy."
On Iran and nuclear threats, he noted that the US was the greatest violator of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. "We signed a pledge that we would begin to disarm, and we're not doing it. We're expanding our nukes. Who the hell are we going to nuke?" he blustered.
He also said this:
"We have no important enemies, We've got to deal with the rest of the world as equals. Who are we afraid of? We spend more on defence than any other country...the military controls not only the budget, it also controls our culture." Wow!

Straw polls following the debate have given Gravel a surprising surge.
On Daily Kos, he has zoomed to a 10 per cent vote, ahead of Kucinich, Biden, Richardson and Dodd - but behind Hillary, Obama and Edwards.

I was pleased with Hillary Clinton, however. She was my winner. She has a confident clarity. Her voice has a headmistress timbre, so we pay attention. She is emotionally controlled - calm and rational. She also is comprehensively informed on any topic you throw her. She can think on her feet. She is diplomatic, always knowing what not to say as well as what to say. She has been criticised for this, but, hell, that is what politics is all about.
She also has been endlessly criticised for insufficient mea culpa about voting for the War on Iraq. How many times does she have to regret it? How many times does she have to say that, if she knew then what she knew now, she would never have done so? Anyway, she said it all again - and was criticised all over again by the likes of Edwards and Kucinich.
It was a rather delicious irony to note that she was the most generous-spirited among the candidates, ready to give credit to others.
Oh, yes, she stood right out.

John Edwards lost ground for me in the debate. He says his $400 haircut was "a mistake which has been remedied now". How? He paid the campaign fund back? That is really not a remedy to the primping vanity of $400 haircuts. Edwards went on to defend his "privileged" millionaire lifestyle by claiming not to have forgotten his roots and went into a Southern boy, Down Home childhood tale of how the family left a restaurant when his millworker father realised he could not afford to pay its prices. I think we have had enough of these cornball anecdotes from Edwards. I, for one, have heard them all before. Furthermore, he was the only candidate to suggest that he felt a need to consult his "Lord" .

Dennis Kucinich also lost ground. I had respected his uncompromising leftist views - but in the debate, he showed a bitchy streak I did not like, sniping at his peers, glancing at Hillary and saying "apologies aren't enough". What the hell? Apologies are enough - and forgiveness is all. Kucinich also admitted to being a gun-owner. Hillary was one of the few who indicated never having owned a weapon, at the same time reiterating careful placations to the mighty gun lobby. Everyone seems to do this.

Bill Richardson is known as the darling of the gun lobby. He is a Westerner and he owns guns - but thinks the screening processes for gun purchase are lacking, as evidenced by Cho and the Virginia Tech shooting.
I found Richards a bit bombastic, something of a hothead and too fond of speaking in lists. From this quaint pressure-cooker appearance, I wouldn't put him in the White House.

Joe Biden is charming and he looks the way a president should look. When asked about his greatest mistake, he said it was in "overestimating the competence of this administration" and "stupid enough to believe that I could influence George W Bush's thinking". He brought the house down when, accused of "uncontrolled verbosity" and being a "gaffe machine" and asked if he would have the self-control for the role of president, he said simply "yes" - and not another word. Silence.

Chris Dodd pointed out his considerable qualifications for the job of president but was underwhelming in debate, especially when he spoke on civil unions versus same-sex marriage. He is for the former and against the latter. I liked his idea of diplomacy rather than war, and his quote: "This administration treats diplomacy as if it were a gift to our opponent; a sign of weakness, not a sign of strength".

Barack Obama was my biggest loser. He seemed extremely nervous, which is forgivable. But he also seemed arrogant. He never makes a speech that does not mention his wife and children, which is beginning to grate - and, gratuitously, he mentioned them again. His big mistake in my book was when he went to town on Iran, showing that he has swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the current media campaign to turn Iran into an immediate threat. It is rather reminiscent of the Iraq and "weapons of mass destruction" campaign. Obama said that he believed that Iran was a nuclear threat as well as the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the form of Hezbollah and Hamas and therefore was a threat to the security of the USA.
My conclusion is that Obama is, indeed, the young and inexperienced candidate - and it showed. He is simply not ready for the presidency.

Hillary is.