Top Political Blog To Host Two Presidential Debates

There was a time when politicians and blogs did not go together. The first didn’t want to stoop down to the level of the second, where nobodies (bloggers) could hit at somebodies (politicians) and where the rules were very simple: anything goes. Talking points were the way to go. Staged town hall-style meet-and-greets with audiences firmly vetted for unruly truth seekers. That’s where the candidates for public office felt they belonged.

Today, things are a bit different. Blogs are just as popular as historically significant news outlets, and some have even established teams of independent investigative journalists of their own to follow and critique the campaigners’ every word, wherever they go. And now one of the most well-known of the punditry palaces, the Huffington Post, plans to accredit itself as the first blog, with the help of Yahoo! Inc and Slate, a Washington Post Company-owned online magazine, to “host two debates among presidential hopefuls ahead of the 2008 election.”

The Huffington Post, operated under the tutelage of Arianna Huffington, a one-time candidate for the governorship of the State of California, stated Monday that it intended to orchestrate a couple of online-only debates – one for each of the US’s largest political parties – to occur in September.

This news came the day after a New York Times story published with the headline, "Debates Losing a Bit of Luster in a Big Field," stated rather clearly the parties’ disinterest in partaking in frequent public debates. In an interview for the article, Jonathan Prince, presidential candidate John Edwards’s deputy campaign manager, stated, “It’s a mess. Debates are important, but in these big multi-candidate races they end up not being an exchange of ideas, but just an exchange of sound bites. They have become a distraction.”

While I myself can agree with that judgment, the cause of the sound bite phenomenon is not the debate itself, but a mixture of the way the event is orchestrated and the caliber of the questions disseminated by the moderator(s) of the debate. If a moderator softly tosses a softball at one or several candidates, chances are the candidate(s) will return an answer, presumably partly or entirely canned, softly and safely. Fastballs and curveballs tend to bring about different results.

If the Huffington Post desires to establish itself as a serious outside-The-Beltway reprieve from the typical and the tired, Arianna and gang (which includes Yahoo! and Slate) will do well to provide a list of reader-chosen questions for the candidates - regardless of official or unofficial political leanings - to answer. That will not only make the debates venues for unique, blog-style, unedited inquires and responses, but will also launch blogs and their writers deeply and permanently into an area where they will be valued as much as (and perhaps more so in some circumstances) the “mainstream” media houses of the day.