I'll give the long and short of it. The debate tonight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was one of the most shameful affairs in modern political discourse. It took 49 minutes before the ABC moderators asked any questions about policy. Almost a full hour had passed spent piling on Obama about scandals which had either been addressed (Reverend Wright) or which had been considered trivial by most (flag pins and such). The questions that were asked sounded almost like fishing for right-wing sound bites - this was an actual question asked: "Sen. Obama, do you believe that Reverend Wright is as patriotic as you are?" The policy questions that were asked were strange in that they had little to do with any salient issues and seemed more like gotcha-questions - tax cuts aren't a particularly important issue for the average American right now but 20 minutes of the debate were spent badgering the candidates to pledge a "no new taxes" platform; Gibson even engaged in a sort of pro-supply side pantomime with Obama, deriving correlation between capital gains taxes and economic growth, without proving or giving evidence for any causal relationship.It's hard to know where to begin with this, less than an hour after you signed off from your Democratic presidential debate here in my hometown of Philadelphia, a televised train wreck that my friend and colleague Greg Mitchell has already called, quite accurately, "a shameful night for the U.S. media." It's hard because -- like many other Americans -- I am still angry at what I just witnesses, so angry that it's hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking. Look, I know that "media criticism" -- especially when it's one journalist speaking to another -- tends to be a genteel, colleagial thing, but there's no genteel way to say this.
With your performance tonight -- your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane "issue" questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters -- you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it's even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to "export democracy," and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, "no thank you." Because that was no way to promote democracy...
Roughly 7 minutes of the opening half was spent on an extremely tenuous connection between Obama's run for the Illinois state legislature and a former member of the Weather Underground, which interestingly shut its doors about the time Obama was celebrating his twelfth birthday. The question was asked by George Stephanapoulos and originated from none other than Sean Hannity (He recommended the question be asked to Stephanopoulos weeks before the debate).
The fact that Mrs. Clinton felt it necessary to "pile on" and thrash Obama at the same time a the moderators was troubling as well, but let's be honest, any expectations of moral rectitude from the Clintons is a game of endless, woeful disappointment.
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