Diary Of A Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

Blogging the Presidentials

By Joan McCarter, 8-07-07

The second annual YearlyKos convention has come and gone, and with it the days when bloggers could be dismissed by traditional media as some kind of fringe element. The coverage of the convention has reflected the reality that the community of bloggers and citizen journalists are highly informed, intelligent, and civically minded. This reality was cemented when seven of the eight Democratic presidential candidates walked onto the stage of the main ballroom in the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago on Saturday. I was fortunate to be one of the moderators of what turned out to be a rousing, engaged and far too short forum.

We three moderators, the New York Times Magazine’s Matt Bai, Kossack, Frameshop proprietor, and author Jeffrey Feldman, and I, had hoped that the Presidential Leadership Forum would be more interesting, substantive, and interactive than previous debates. We tried to go for questions that would speak more to leadership and governing philosophy than hot-button issue reactions. Many of the topics covered in previous debates—as important as they may be—had already been talked out, and we were highly unlikely to learn anything new from them. On the issues previously addressed, we tried to come at them from an angle that would hopefully get us something new.

We wanted to try to force candidates out of their stump speech talking points--to set them a little on edge and try to force an informative conversation out of that discomfort. We were only partly successful—they have a hell of a lot more practice at this than us, and can turn a question on a dime into the one they want to answer. Even so, up there on stage, it felt like we had the most lively, engaged debate yet among these candidates.

The discussion sparked on lobbying was a complete surprise to me, a good one. We had decided early on that if that kind of conversation happened, we’d let it go, sacrificing our “script” in the hopes of getting into some new territory. One of the key elements, I believe, in this level of engagement between the candidates was the intense energy they were getting from the crowd. They obviously recognized this was not your average partisan rally crowd, but a demanding, informed, and critical audience that wasn’t going to be talked down to. But at the same time, the raucous energy of the audience came onto the stage in waves, and really contributed to the passion of the candidates on stage.

The combination of forum structure, setting, and the crowd led to some good results, and some bad. Governor Richardson and Senator Dodd really showed us something we hadn’t seen before. Richardson was more engaged than I’d yet seen him in a debate. He answered the first question on why he had chosen the entirely mediocre Justice White as his model Supreme Court Justice in a previous debate with honesty ("I screwed that one up") and humor, turning the question into a discussion about the Court, which led to just one of Dodd’s passionate and intelligent comments on the Constitution. It seems unlikely either of these two will break out of the pack to become top-tier candidates, but they both have important messages they’re trying to get out—messages that tend to be ignored by the traditional media in its obsessive focus on just the top two in the race.

The downside to all of those factors—structure, setting, and crowd—was the candidates knew they were in front of a hugely partisan crowd that was going to love red meat, and they served it up, sometimes treating the event as a rally rather than conversation. Knowing that the 2,000 people in the room were all immediately going to blog their impressions, getting the word out to the hundreds of thousands of blog readers around the country, made the candidates more than determined to go for the big applause line.

Moderating this debate was a singular experience on so many levels. It gave me new insight and appreciation to the job that those other moderators--the professional ones—do in wrangling egos and agendas on stage. Because, frankly, there were a few times when we just got steamrolled by them. They were going to use their talking points, actual question or clock be damned. It’s very hard to get them to say something new. Another lesson learned is that disasters are far more compelling than a bunch of bloggers and politicians, so if CNN says they’re going to televise you live, don’t tell your entire family to watch, because bridge collapses happen.

The debate might show up sometime in the wee hours on C-SPAN over the next few weeks, but if you want to catch it, you can watch online at PoliticsTV.com. You can see the questions I didn’t get to ask here, but be sure to come back to this page to post any questions or comments.

Editor’s note: Joan McCarter’s weekly blogs are part of a new feature on NewWest.Net/Politics called “Diary of a Mad Voter,” a group blog, published in partnership with the Denver Post’s Politics West intended give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the ‘08 election cycle. Check back this week at www.newwest.net/madvoter.

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