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My column today is about the fact that when you give regular people the opportunity to question politicians in various "town hall" type settings, they often do a better job than journalists. Since the GOP primary debate season will soon begin, I thought it might be good to remind ourselves of what happened four years ago. You may remember that one ridiculous debate after another culminated in the disastrous ABC News debate in which Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos quizzed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on whether they'd serve as each other's running mates, their chances in the general election, and such critical topics as flag pins, Obama's pastor (Stephanopoulos to Obama: "Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?") and whether each had appropriately apologized for various misstatements. The debate was nearly half over before the first question about policy was asked. But there's one other incident I thought it was worth remembering, from the debate CNN sponsored with YouTube. At one point in that debate, a young woman asked Clinton, "Do you prefer diamonds or pearls?" Lots of people no doubt said, "Sheesh, that's the best you could come up with?" But the real story was a bit more complicated:
Last week, CNN had contacted Ms. Parra-Sandoval, a political science student at University of Las Vegas-Nevada, through a professor, and asked her to submit a question. She wrote one about health care for children. CNN rejected it, calling it too similar to another question that would be asked. (No such question was.) So she sent another, about Iraq. That was rejected too. On Wednesday, a CNN producer asked her for two final questions, one substantive and one light. Ms. Parra-Sandoval sent one about Yucca Mountain, the Nevada site under consideration as a storage facility for radioactive waste. With the deadline approaching, she stared at her computer screen. Noticing the pearl-pattern background on her MySpace page, she dashed off the jewelry one.It's worth remembering this story, because there's little reason to believe the upcoming GOP debates are going to be any less inane. But maybe the news organizations that sponsor them could consider asking questions about the things whoever is president two years from now will actually be dealing with.CNN asked her to come to the debate with both questions memorized. Two hours in, a producer whispered that she should ask the second one.
"Because I was on national TV, I felt hesitant, but then I felt like, 'Oh my God, I'm on national TV, I'll just ask it,'" Ms. Parra-Sandoval said.
Now Ms. Parra-Sandoval is being accused, by everyone from bloggers to fellow students, of asking an airheaded, sexist question. On her MySpace page and in a phone interview, she protested that she tried to ask several substantive questions but that CNN would only let her participate through a silly one.
