A few months ago, I made a few predictions about the CNN - YouTube Democratic Debate. This past week saw the CNN - YouTube Republican Debate actually come to pass. I have to say that I was disappointed. One of the predictions I made was that there would be 30,000 videos submitted. I was way, way off. There were about 5,000 videos submitted. This was in spite of the fact that the debate was delayed as the Republican candidates couldn’t all get on the same page about when to have the debate.

I also commented that I felt in the Democratic debate that the format hearkened to Al Gore’s book The Assault on Reason in that it was an example of how the Internet can restore democracy in America. I’m not sure I feel quite so strongly about it now. They did have two thirds again as many videos submitted, so the format was obviously popular and growing in popularity. However, since the folks at CNN were picking the videos to use, there’s still a lot of corporate influence on the actual content used. I think it’s a step in the right direction, but certainly not as big of one as I felt it was after the first debate.

As for the actual debate, I was again disappointed. I wanted to see a question about healthcare, but there wasn’t one. I wanted to see a question about public education, but the only education question was about college tuition. I wanted to see the questions make a distinction between themselves and George W. Bush, but there really wasn’t a whole lot of that either. The best question in my opinion was about the national debt:

Unfortunately, later in the debate there was a very similar question about repaying Social Security. I thought that one of these questions should really have been replaced with something else - healthcare, the environment, electronic voting, privacy, whatever. There were a lot of things that weren’t covered.

I still like the idea of the debates. The format is he best one we have these days (though it doesn’t replace actively researching a candidate’s positions yourself…). However, we could make a few changes that would improve it. I would introduce a voting system that would allow people to vote on a few questions to make sure they were included. I would also try to eliminate questions that are only answered by one candidate. I think the kinds of things that should be asked are the kinds of things that require debate, not the kinds of things that can be handled in an interview.