For all the obvious amateurism in the latest Democratic presidential candidates? debate using videos from You Tube contributors, the device produced the first major basis for assessing the qualifications of the two front-runners, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
It came late in the CNN debate, when a voter asked Obama via a video whether he would “be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea?”
The question came in the context of the Bush administration?s refusal or reluctance to do so, except in the recent productive talks with the communist regime in Pyongyang over its nuclear weapons program. Obama unhesitatingly said he would.
The answer reflected his determination to set himself apart from the status quo, as the promised agent of change if elected next year. “The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them, which has been the guiding principle of this administration, is ridiculous,” Obama said.
Immediately Clinton jumped on his reply. “I would not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year,” she said. She had no intention, she went on, to let them use her to make propaganda hay out of such a premature meeting, without first exploring their intentions through lower-level diplomatic conversations.
Clinton?s answer demonstrated, not for the first time in these early debates, her talent for thinking on her feet, for quickly assessing the tactical situation and advantage presented her, and driving it home. As the self-proclaimed candidate of experience as opposed to Obama?s short suit on foreign policy, she deftly put him down.
The next day, in a newspaper interview in Iowa, she said Obama?s suggestion of snap meetings was “irresponsible and frankly naïve,” making her point of his inexperience again. Obama, in return, seized on that comment and demonstrated his ability as a counter-puncher, by injecting the one clear edge he has on her with Democratic critics of the war in Iraq.
“I think what is irresponsible and naive,” he said, “is to have authorized a war without asking how we were going to get out.” The rejoinder referred to Clinton?s 2002 vote authorizing use of force against Iraq, for which she has declined to apologize, while now pushing for withdrawal of U.S. troops. Obama added defensively that he had no intention of meeting with the leaders of the hostile countries without diplomatic preparations beforehand.
The exchange may have been no more than a spontaneous flashpoint between the two. But it did show how the voter?s question could elicit a sharp dividing line between the two front-runners, who until then had found themselves struggling to break out from the eight-candidate field. The exchange left the other six essentially as bystanders.
The You Tube format, for all its technical missteps, was another step toward the involvement of the Internet in presidential politics, and the diminution of the news media and print press particularly as interrogators of the candidates.
Many reporters have demeaned the use of average citizens in their stead, contending they pose softball or uniformed questions. In some earlier debates, however, randomly selected voters brought into the studio to pose questions directly and live to the candidates have similarly evoked revealing answers.
In 1992, in a debate in Richmond, Va., among President George H.W. Bush, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, a young woman asked how “the national debt personally affected each of your lives,” and they could understand “the economic problems of the common people if you have no experience in what?s ailing them?”
Bush stammered through an impersonal reference to high interest rates and his concern about being able “to afford an education” for his (financially secure) grandchildren. Clinton got off his stool, approached the questioner and told her face-to-face of his personal exposure to struggling middle-class Arkansas constituents. Good bye, the first Bush presidency.
The Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama moment may prove to be transitory and indecisive. But for the moment, it was revealing about each of them, which is what these debates are supposed to do.
Jules Witcover, a Baltimore Examiner columnist, is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He has covered national affairs from Washington for more than 50 years and is the author of 11 books, and co-author of five others, on American politics and history.
