Archive: Year: 2007

If you want to know how CNN's crack news team picked the video questions that would be used in last night's GOP presidential debate, you can watch this video of CNN's David Bohrman, the show's executive producer and the network's DC bureau chief. Just don't expect to come away enlightened. Bohrman seems far more enamored of his glitzy mobile newsroom with its "terabytes" of video storage capacity than he is in offering us any insight into the process. "i like questions that are interesting...

My quick take: This "debate," like last summer's Democratic CNN/YouTube debate, made for lively television. I'm sure it got a big audience, in part because the Republicans hadn't "debated" in a month and in part because of audience curiosity about the YouTube element. The infighting among the Republican candidates certainly made the event even more interesting. But was this a breakthrough for the internet's role in politics? Not so much. Yes, when a question comes from a civilian rather than a professional journalist, it can pack an unexpected emotional punch. A couple of questions included in tonight's debate did that--like the one from the retired Brigadier General who asked about gays in the military (turns out he may be a Hillary...

Time for a bit of a rant. I listened in on the Edwards campaign's press call this morning where they launched a new website called AmericaBelongstoUs2008.com, asking voters to sign a pledge "not to vote or caucus for a Democratic presidential candidate that accepts campaign contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs." Edwards' top advisers Joe Trippi and Jonathan Prince were on the call, making much of how our broken political system is dominated by lobbyists and special interests, and trying to distinguish their candidate from the other Dems for not taking contributions from DC lobbyists. But here's what offended me--and I'm sorry if this is going to sound like an attack on the Edwards campaign, because it's not. It's just...

Finally, a presidential candidate has seized the opportunity presented by the CNN/YouTube debates and posted a question of his colleagues. Remember when techPresident blogger David All urged his Republican colleagues to inject a question into the Democratic debate? Well, it looks like the creative minds at Chris Dodd's campaign--which has already distinguished itself with a string of web innovations--were paying attention. A few days ago, they posted this question from Senator Dodd for this Wednesday's Republican CNN/YouTube event: Here's the transcript of Dodd's question: Hi I’m Chris Dodd. I’m from East Haddam, Connecticut. And my family and I are spending a little time in Iowa these days. I have a question about the Constitution. Many Americans are concerned that the Administration seems to be making...

We've posted the top ten vote-getting videos, and they are: 1. Question for Pres Candidates About Net Neutrality (6392 net positive votes) 2. Is America unofficially a theocracy? (4993) 3. Medical Marijuana (4216) 4. Warrantless Wiretapping (3637) 5. Fair Elections Campaign Reform (2718) 6. Why won't you pledge to abolish [corporate personhood] (1957) 7. Transparency (1948) 8. Is our voting system broken? (1850) 9. 10Questions: Size of Government (1789) 10. Two Party System Bad (1149) You'll note that Lunch4lyfe's second question, "What about the *non* religious voters?" is not included, because he very graciously suggested that we drop it from the list, as it essentially duplicated his question about America and theocracy. That made room for "Two Party System Bad." We're very pleased by the diversity of topics generated and we'll...

The voting on the first round of 10Questions closed last night at midnight Eastern time, and what a run it's been! We topped out at 121,614 votes, of which approximately 23,000 came in during last 10 hours of the day. We also ended up with more than 31,000 individual participants, way exceeding our expectations. A bunch of new video questions were submitted at the last minute, and one of them, on the size of government, was powered into the top ten by the concerted efforts of its maker, Patrick Ruffini, and his friends among conservatives online. And that development is worth discussing in some depth, as it has raised the hackles of some users, judging from some of the emails we've...

Today's the last day of voting on 10Questions.com, and not surprisingly, there's a lot of activity on the site and on the web too. In the last 24 hours, we've seen about 4,500 unique visits to the site, and more than 5,000 new votes cast. As of 1:30pm Eastern time, we were at 97,789 votes...

We’re pleased to announce that America Online is now a cosponsor of 10Questions, and people can use their video platform to post questions to the site—though you still have to remember to tag videos “10Questions.” We’ve had another burst of fresh videos posted to the site, with the total now at 167. Since Monday morning, another 4,000 votes have been cast, with about 1,500 new participants joining in, bringing us to a current total of 77,650 votes from 23,586 voters. It’s interesting to note that at least two of the current top ten questions are about issues relating to fixing the political system (“Is our voting system broken?” from the activist group Why Tuesday? and “Two party system bad?") and among the...

Democracy for America, the organizing network that grew out of the ashes of the Dean campaign, has announced the results of its "Pulse Poll" on the Democratic presidential race. With more than 150,000 votes cast, the winner is Dennis Kucinich, with 49,000. He did not get the 66% required to get DfA's endorsement, however. The internal results of the poll, which was open to anyone who registered on DfA's site but was intended to mainly draw in progressive Democrats, are pretty interesting, especially because the group asked people to make up to three choices and to rank them in order. So, for example, you can take the 38,000+ write-in votes that went to Al Gore (25% of the total cast), and...

I'm on the record from May 24 as saying that "Ron Paul is to the Republicans of 2008 as Howard Dean was to the Democrats of 2004," and I'll stand by that analogy for two reasons. First, like Dean, Paul is attracting an unusual level of grass-roots support because he doesn't mince words and, on the #1 issue of the day, the Iraq War, he is speaking out in opposition like no other presidential candidate in his political party. And second, like Dean, Paul is running a loosely-controlled campaign that freely shares attention with its base, and thus benefits from all kinds of self-organizing energies from below. Like Dean, Paul is now finally being taken seriously as a result of...