LONG VERDICT. The debate was fine, but I have to break with my colleague Garance's heaping of praise on the YouTube format. Letting CNN choose from a storehouse of thousands of questions was, I thought, quite bad for the event. It allowed them to wander through and pick questions that would've been far too "gotcha" oriented for the host too ask, but were perfectly fine when hidden behind the constructed authenticity of user-contributed -- but elite-filtered -- content. A good example here was the question asking if soldiers were dying in vain, either now or in Vietnam. There is literally no hint of illumination an answer to this question could offer. It's merely a baldfaced attempt to force the candidates to tightrope between their opposition to the war and their need to constantly offer encomiums to the troops. If Anderson Cooper had asked that, a candidate could have accused him of divisiveness. Not so with the blurry representative of the vox populi appearing over webcam. It would be one thing to have the users actually vote on questions and direct the debate. But the appearance of authenticity under the control of the same-old cable news crew was, I think, both a bit damaging and quite a bit misleading. --Ezra Klein
