"She's gonna have to answer questions"

Sarah Palin has yet to submit to candid and adversarial questioning by the press, and there is virtually no record of her views on governing philosophy, the Iraq War, separation of powers, Constitutional rights during wartime, Guantanamo, free trade, health care, the role of the UN, US geopolitical strategy, China, deficit spending, tax cuts, education, and much, much more.

I wonder what her views are, and what percentage of them were formed in a cram session after she was chosen as McCain's VP.

Obama ex post facto

He looks a lot better after the debate--and is having a lot more fun:



UPDATE: Shamefully, I was too white to pick up the subliminal pop-cultural reference. Which probably means that, therefore, Alex is less white than me. Oh man.

A depressing view of a journalist's job

David Brooks had an uncharacteristically off-base comment about tonight's Democratic debate:

First, Democrats, and especially Obama supporters, are going to jump all over ABC for the choice of topics: too many gaffe questions, not enough policy questions.

I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault.

Wrong, David. Though the journalist's job often entails making politicians uncomfortable in a variety of ways, this sort of gotcha-game is not the journalist's job per se.

It is not helpful to "expose" a "contradiction" of some candidate when there is nothing at stake besides making the candidate look momentarily foolish; there's got to be some substantive and pressing issue that the interrogation is leading up to, some civic payoff. Thus, grilling Hillary Clinton about her sniperfire remarks is fine but only if it's leading up to some hard questions about just what her claims of experience amount to; and hammering Obama on the Wright issue is appropriate so long as it serves as an entry point into what Obama's views of race are. But lingering for 45 minutes on this stuff with no substantive upshot is nothing more than the fetishization of insider campaign politics.

A Debate Question

By the end of the primaries there will have been something like 20 debates between the Democratric candidates. Through all that, there haven't been very many interesting questions posed to them--the debates are typically moderated by creatures of the 24 news cycle, and so the issues and questions raised have almost all been along the lines of whatever media narrative was being played up at the time. At its worst, the CNN moderators were actually changing the wording of audience members' questions when they were deemed not hackish enough.

The question I've always wanted asked was this: "What, if anything, has the Bush administration done in the last 8 years to violate the Constitution?" I think a question like this would really pin down the candidates' views on the limits of executive power, and reveal how serious they are about protecting civil liberties. It would be disappointing to me if they talked around this question in a platitudinous way instead of giving an impassioned condemnation of (what I believe to be) Bush's various abuses of executive power. And there might even be a substantive difference between Clinton and Obama on the issue.