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BRING IT ON. You know, I'd agree with Ezra about the pointedness of the questions if it weren't for the fact that the candidates, in the main, handled them so beautifully. I think one of the reasons the Vietnam question stood out so much is that it was directed to Mike Gravel, and answered by him.
QUESTION: My name is Don. I’m from West Virginia.I think the biggest difference between the CNN/YouTube debate and a standard MSM-questioner debate is that no one would have bothered to frame a question around something Gravel had said in an MSM-scripted debate. Sure the questions to the field were tough, but Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama answered the very dicey race and gender questions posed to them just wonderfully, with poise and grace, and Clinton dispatched the "are you a liberal?" question she was obviously going to get at some point with a deft and thoughtful answer. I would be shocked to learn such a reply came to her on the spot, as well. Any Democrat who's running for president who doesn't have a good answer to that question already memorized by the time they enter the debate arena is an idiot, and Clinton is hardly so delicate a flower that she could be thrown by a question that's been lobbed at Democratic presidential candidates for more than 20 years. Just because Mike Dukakis flubbed this one doesn't mean Democrats have to do so into perpetuity.My question is for Mike Gravel. In one of the previous debates you said something along the lines of the entire deaths of Vietnam died in vain.
How do you expect to win in a country where probably a pretty large chunk of the people voting disagree with that statement and might very well be offended by it?
I’d like to know if you plan to defend that statement, or if you’re just going to flip-flop.
Thanks.
Indeed, what the debate showed last night is that for the first time in a very long time the Democrats are blessed with a field of people who can take whatever's dished out and turn it into dinner, rather than weeping into their soup-cups.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
