Tag: 2008 elections
If It's Historic, Who Won?
After prefacing the liveblog below with the prediction and challenge to the candidates that tonight was a once in a generation opportunity to really debate as the next president and the first black or women, I owe it to readers to do something I have become somewhat disenchanted with -- pick a winner.
But to explain what a winner is it is important to explain why I have become disenchanted with that. Several reasons. First, the debates have been multi-candidate debate up to now. Second, the format has not always given equal opportunity to contestants. Third, and most importantly, the idea of winning is so dependent on expectations and on contexts outside of the debate that the "winner" was not determined by the debate but by the press coverage and other later, intervening events.
This last factor still has importance, but the context tonight was clear enough and the variables were reduced enough that I can posit a judgment. My judgment is just that. Considered, but not "objective" or definitive. Please help me and yourself by engaging me in dispute about or questioning of this judgment.
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: debate, debates, democratic presidential primary, 2008 elections, California, January
MTV/MySpace and McCain
I'm watching John McCain on the "MTV/MySpace Presidential Dialogue" live from the Southern New Hampshire University. I'm watching via TV, but the host billed it as the first and only that is live via the web, TV, and mobiles, in English and in Spanish. Viewers can participate in real time via instant messaging, too.
In addition to a host (John Norris), Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post moderates by keeping track of the live questions streaming in and keeping track of the instant feedback online polling as it updates during the debate. He also asks some follow up questions.
Viewers/listeners can vote on how well they think the candidate answered each question. They can pick one of four ratings (two positive and two negative) to each answer and the choices are contextualized to the question!
The questions and answers are as good as or better than any I have seen in any of the debates and forums.
McCain was announced as the first of the Republican candidates to participate. John Edwards and Barack Obama participated earlier.
There is not a schedule at the site listing when other candidates might participate.
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: MTV-MySpace, John McCain, 2008 elections, mashup, republican presidential primary
Preview of Previews of the GOP YouTube Debate
To get ready for tonight's GOP CNN/YouTube presidential primary debate (8pm EST on CNN and streamed at CNN.com) I read the blogs and the papers so you wouldn't have to. If you want to check my work or read more, I bookmarked everything for you at del.icio.us.
To find the best of the web on tonight's debate just go to del.icio.us and insert the following (no quote marks, no commas) into the search box there: GOP youtube debatescoop. To narrow the search to articles focused on the questions add the word questions. To narrow to pieces previewing and predicting add the word preview.
After the debate you can do the same search but add winners/losers to find items discussing how the debate turned out.
But for now, you can simply click on "read more" to find my synthesis of the news and my own take aways from it. . . .
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: debate, debates, 2008 elections, republican presidential primary, youtube, GOP, questions, formats, roundup
October Democratic Debate
The World Series is over, the academic debate season is in full swing (slowing down my blogging), a chill is in the air and maybe the long debate season for the Democratic primary contenders will shift gears tonight at 9 pm ET from Drexel, a two hour affair on MSNBC.
Since the first debate last spring, little has changed. We've lost only one of the eight candidates, curmudgeon Mike Gravel. Hillary Clinton is still the front runner.
Obama claims to be going on the attack. Tonight's debate is worth watching for voters who are just now getting interested and for those of us who have been judging the debates all along.
The intercollegiate debate topic is on U.S. policy towards the Middle East. At the Harvard tournament this weekend there was much more sophisticated debate on the range of options we should consider with regard to Iran than we have heard from the candidates. The Iran issue is rapidly unfolding as a great test of candidates' foreign policy chops. Perhaps the questions can be as good as the cross-ex was at Harvard even if the answers aren't.
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: debate, debates, presidential primary, 2008 elections, democratic
Pre-season Is Over If Viewership Is the Measure
Pundits have been saying that in spite of the extra long campaign season this cycle, the real game will be on once we pass Labor Day.
If the ratings for Wednesday's GOP presidential primary debate at the University of New Hampshire on FOX News are any indication, the pundits have a point.
Courtesy of Variety's Multichannel:
The debate, hosted by Fox News, drew 3.14 million total viewers and 854,000 viewers in the adults 25 to 54 demographic. The network's performance easily topped nine previous presidential debates held this year, including the 2.2 rating and 2.42 million households ABC posted for the Aug. 19 Democratic debate.
As I find them I have been bookmarking viewership reports at del.iciou.us. Just go there and do this search to see all of the articles: debatescoop viewership.
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: debate, debates, 2008 elections, GOP presidential primary, viewership, ratings
YearlyKos Presidential Forum Questioners -- Following the YouTube Act
[editor's note, by Ross Smith] Cross posted at Huffington Post's "Off the Bus" site.
If the YouTube debate taught nothing else it was that the questions and the questioners matter. So I sat down for a brief interview with each of the questioners for today's YearlyKos Presidential Forum to ask them what is uppermost in their minds as they prepare their questions. New York Times Magazine journalist Matt Bai, Daily Kos "front pager," Joan McCarter a.k.a. mcjoan, and Daily Kos diarist and Frameshop blogger, Jeffrey Feldman, play the roles as questioners that are crucial to the success of the forum. They have help from the blogosphere at large which is already sharing the credit for attracting the field of candidates that includes every Democrat except Joe Biden and Dennis Kucinich, but blame will not likely be so easily shared.
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: YearlyKos, democratic presidential primary, 2008 elections, questions
The Best and Worst Questions?
Cross posted at Huffington Post's Off the Bus pages (but this DebateScoop has new info unavailable earlier).
Jack Muse reported that Monday's first YouTube debate "has been widely praised in all corners of the media" because of the one respect in which it really differed from previous debates, the use of citizen generated video questions.
But what is a good question? Which of the questions in Monday's debate were better and which worse? Our students and faculty at the Ben Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Initiative and the Wake Forest University Debate program set out to answer just that question and we have some interesting, albeit preliminary, answers.
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: debates, debate, 2008 elections, democratic primary, YouTube, questions
Previews and Reviews
There's more coming soon, including the results of our question rating survey, a piece analogizing these "debates" to the cross-examination period in formal academic debate, and reflection (with evidence) on how the YouTube debate has ongoing effects.
Meanwhile, create an account at the site if you have not already done so so you can comment and write your own posts.
You can poke around in the "Quick Roundup" links, and read the insightful articles exploring the intersection of the candidate debates and education by David Thomas and Sue Peterson.
Listen to the NPR interview of me and two of the students involved in our debate watch and YouTube question creation.
Or, just for fun, watch the Daily Show's doubly ironic take down of the traditional journalist and the citizen journalist as they "analyze" the debate.
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: debate, debates, YouTube, democratic presidential primary, 2008 elections
I Got "Off the Bus" During the YouTube Debate!
[ED} The article below by Sue Peterson, Director of Forensics at CSU Chico, is a testament to the combined power of debate and networks. I posted about the Huffington Post "Off the Bus" project on the e-debate listserv on the weekend, encouraging people to participate and to let me know if they did. Sue took the ball and ran it way down field. Her write up below is proof of the power and potential of networking and debate education. --Ross
I participated in the online chat room (using Campfire) sponsored by Off the Bus last night. It was an interesting process that I thought had both strengths and weaknesses and a few things that surprised me. It definitely got me thinking about the applicability and importance of these kinds of activities to both debate and general communication studies.
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: Youtube, debates, debate, Democratic Presidential Primaries, education, 2008 elections
Quick Roundup of the First YouTube Debate
Since I am teaching at a summer debate workshop in addition to multiple other duties, the roundup will be brief.
But it's also a new and improved round up of sorts.
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: debate, debates, YouTube, democratic presidential primary, 2008 elections
Liveblog of the First CNN/YouTube Debate
Use the comments here to join us in responding to the debate as it happens.
Debate students and coaches from Wake Forest and across the nation are joining in this liveblog tonight.
Click Discuss to join in!
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: liveblog, YouTube, democratic presidential primary, 2008 elections
Preview of a "First": Tonight's YouTube Debate
Tonight, from 7-9 p.m. Eastern, CNN will broadcast and stream from their site the first debate in which all of the questions are generated by submissions from the public of their self-recorded video via a submission site at YouTube. While the formal live venue is at the campus of the Citadel in Charleston, SC, all eyes are on the internet and the focus is as much on the questions as the answers.
DebateScoop will, as always have a liveblog thread beginning just before the debate, but this time the participants will be somewhat unique. Join students and staff from the Wake Forest summer debate workshop for high school students and from other summer programs for debate students on our liveblog thread.
Today's preview also has a different form of links. Instead of summarizing the blog and media coverage and providing links here, I have conveniently tagged everything of interest I have found about the debate at the social bookmarking site, Delicious.
If you go to Delicious and use their search box in the upper right of the page to search for "youtube debatescoop" (without the quotation marks) you will find links to the most interesting articles about tonight's debate I have seen on the web and in blogs. If you click on "...saved by one person" under any of the cites you will get to a page that includes my "user notes" that give a taste of or quote from the article.
Enjoy, and see you at the liveblog!
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: debate, debates, YouTube, democratic presidential primary, 2008 elections
Inside the Richardson Debate Prep Room with Jeff Parcher
I am privileged by having a long friendship and professional relationship with Jeff Parcher, Senior Communications Advisor to the Richardson campaign. Like some of my (few) regular readers, I first met Jeff when he was a national caliber debater for Western Washington University and I was a judge. Jeff went on to be the Debate Coach at Georgetown University where his team was always one of the best prepared in the nation and won the National Debate Tournament in 1992.
Jeff will do another interview with us comparing and contrasting candidate debate prep with the college debate activity after the non-stop intensity of preparing for tomorrow night's CNN/YouTube debate, but for now we are grateful he found the time to tell us about the unique challenges posed by prepping for a debate in which all of the questions are viewable in advance and are submitted by the public:
The interview is below the fold. . . .
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: YouTube, debate, debates, Bill Richardson, Democratic primary, 2008 elections
My Question for the YouTube Debate
Even though Ana Marie Cox has dissed next Monday's CNN/YouTube Democratic primary debate I went ahead and submitted a video of my question and have been successful at persuading some students from the U.S. and Europe at the summer program I am helping teach to submit their questions, too.
Odds are my question won't be featured in the debate itself. There are over 1000 questions already submitted at the submission site. And, unfortunately, there is no grassroots or netroots input into the selection of the questions, a fact that diminishes the debate's claim to "revolutionize" the process as TechPresident's Joshua Levy argues.
Nevertheless, the argument I used to persuade myself and others to submit questions in spite of the odds and the criticism goes as follows:
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: debate, debates, Democratic primary, 2008 elections, YouTube
Reviewing the Howard University Democratic Debate
If you have not watched or heard last night's debate, you can go here to do so on the web, and check C-Span listings.
If you have watched, or if you want a preview, click "Read more . . . " There's MUCH more below the fold, analysis of the candidates and the format.
A round up of the thoughts of the blogosphere and the rest of the media will follow tomorrow.
Please add your thoughts in the comments.
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: Tavis Smiley, democratic presidential primary, 2008 elections, debate, debates
