presidential debates

So far this debate season, I think that one of the more interesting things happening on the campus of each host school is the coverage of the debate from the students themselves, given the tools they now have at their disposal. With both candidates, their campaigns, and a crazy amount of attention coming to their campus, some Hofstra journalism students are preparing to cover it all using some of these tools. I thought I'd highlight it as it provides a great example of how Millennials are using the technology available to them to contribute to a greater dialogue on public affairs.

On Wednesday night, a team of 20-30 students from Hofstra's online journalism class will be staffing a virtual "newsroom" that will be posting on-campus coverage of the debate via online social networking websites and other utilities. Each student in the class has been assigned an outlet to work with before and during the debate. The outlets used in the virtual newsroom include Facebook, Twitter, Mogulus, and CoverItLive.com. According to one of the online journalism students, Katie Nolan, the students will be stationed across campus, prepared to get instant reaction to the events of the debate. While the students will be using CoverItLive.com as their live blog platform, they'll supplement this coverage with both live and pre-recorded content to be shown on Mogulus, a social networking website with free video production capabilities. Facebook and Twitter will be used primarily to help with outreach.

As viewers/readers tune in, they'll be treated to an array of information turned up in research by these journalism students, currently stored in wikis. Each possible topic in tonight's debate has been given its own page, filled with quotes, relevant information, and the candidates' voting records and stances on the respective issue. Because the students will be able to link to these pages, their audience will be able to get more real-time information to assess each candidate's honesty, authenticity, and overall performance.

We talk a lot on this blog about Millennials and their collaborative nature leading to a better politics. But I think one thing I miss when I write about that possibility is what can happen with a Millennial-led media. This is an example.

Nolan, assigned to publicity for the Hofstra class's coverage, explained what this effort means to the class:

Basically, we and our professor believe that the internet has given us so much power and possibility when it comes to getting our message out to the public. We are taking on this task not only to learn about these aforementioned resources, but also to show people that when you put your collaborative minds to a project like this, you can really create something user-friendly and vastly informative.

While Rick Sanchez on CNN may have discovered Twitter and text messaging as ways to reach out to his audience, the reality is that there's very little innovative technological outreach out there while covering important political events. These Hofstra students and others across the country are demonstrating what the future of political news media might look like. With the focus on collaboration, and also on using the latest technology to deliver the information necessary to make an informed decision, these students are leading the way. Honor them by checking out their coverage:

• Twitter Coverage
• Mogulus TV Coverage
• Website and Blog

Debate coverage will begin with a video streamcast starting at 8:00 PM ET on the website/blog.

Snap thoughts on the debate:

• Tom Brokaw was an insufferable ass during the debate. That cannot be stressed enough.
• Considering this was the 'open' and 'participatory' debate with questions coming in over the intertubes, this was a much more structured, controlled event than the last debate. And I would say that voter participation in this debate was zero to nil. C'mon, I mean there were four questions from "the internet," zero transparency in how those questions were selected, and Brokaw decided to throw out one of the questions and ask his own on the fly.
• Considering the role that young people are playing in this campaign, and that this debate was focused on the economy, the #1 issue for young voters, there was very little youth input in the debate. Correct me if I'm wrong, but only 1 questioner seemed youngish: the woman who asked about Green jobs. This needs to be double checked and I'll be happy to be proven wrong, but after 90 minutes I was asking "where were we in this debate?"

  Now, that makes sense. Supposedly these questioners were chosen by Gallup and were all "uncommitted" voters. Youth are anything but uncommitted this year. This might have been an instance where high youth participation and partisanship actually cut our chances of having our voice heard at the debate.

Continuing on the youth thread, I need to go and read through the transcript to get a better sense of how youth issues were addressed (a task for tomorrow morning), but a quick search of the CNN transcript for the terms "youth," "young" and "student" reveals 6 instances - 3 by McCain and 3 by Obama. Two of McCain's answers dealt with his own military record and were highly defensive. In comparison, all three of Obama's answers substantively addressed the current situation of young voters:

Mccain - Debt: We obviously have to stop this spending spree that's going on in Washington. Do you know that we've laid a $10 trillion debt on these young Americans who are here with us tonight, $500 billion of it we owe to China?

Obama - Education: And, number three, we've got to deal with education so that our young people are competitive in a global economy.

Obama - Service: And the last point I just want to make. I think the young people of America are especially interested in how they can serve, and that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in doubling the Peace Corps, making sure that we are creating a volunteer corps all across this country that can be involved in their community, involved in military service, so that military families and our troops are not the only ones bearing the burden of renewing America.

McCain - Military Service: In Lebanon, I stood up to President Reagan, my hero, and said, if we send Marines in there, how can we possibly beneficially affect this situation? And said we shouldn't. Unfortunately, almost 300 brave young Marines were killed.

So you have to temper your decisions with the ability to beneficially affect the situation and realize you're sending America's most precious asset, American blood, into harm's way. And, again, I know those situations.

I've been in them all my life. And I can tell you right now the security of your young men and women who are serving in the military are my first priority right after our nation's security.

McCain - Military Service: I understand what it's like to send young American's in harm's way. I say -- I was joking with a veteran -- I hate to even go into this. I was joking with an old veteran friend, who joked with me, about Iran.

Obama - College Costs: Wages and incomes have gone down. People have lost their health care or are going bankrupt because they get sick. We've got young people who have got the grades and the will and the drive to go to college, but they just don't have the money.

I'll try to go over to the "My Debates" site and see if I can pull video of these quotes out (like you are theoretically supposed to be able to do).

Some post-debate reading:

• Newsweek just put out an open letter to young Obama supporters from a Millennial born on the cusp, Jonathan Darman. I like it all but this part, which unfortunately happens to be the crux of the letter.
  

  With the new fiscal reality, neither he nor John McCain should get away with promising everyone what he or she wants. In debates they will be pressed to explain their priorities. Seize this opportunity. To get the best of Obama, young people, cut out the blind devotion. Get off the Huffington Post. Stop the Facebook blasts. If you really want to be the change you've been waiting for, start holding Obama to some of his promises to our generation. In these waning days of the campaign, ask not what you can do for Barack Obama, ask what Barack Obama can do for you.

  This once again assumes that internet activism doesn't get anything done. Not cool.

• Is Friday night the best night to have a debate in order to attract more youth attention and involvement?
• A Columbus Dispatch piece visits a debate-watching party near Ohio State University to get feedback from both College Dems and College Republicans organizations on campus.
• Michael A. Cohen of the New America Foundation penned a decent piece appearing in the New York Times a few days ago on the state of the race.

  His words at the end dovetailed with the coverage of Obama's performance in the debate so far:

  All of these elements make the presidential debates so crucial for Mr. Obama — and so potentially dangerous for Mr. McCain. Unlike an acceptance speech before a partisan crowd or campaign advertisements, debates are the single best opportunity for a relatively inexperienced presidential candidate to show the electorate their qualifications for America’s top job. Indeed, Mr. McCain’s debate performance will be of almost secondary importance. If Mr. Obama, who already has the political wind at his back, is able to show that he has the proper facility with the major issues of the days to go head-to-head with Mr. McCain, he will go a long way toward erasing the doubts that many voters still have about his experience.

  Since June this election has been Barack Obama’s to lose. Because of his consistent message discipline, Mr. Obama has ensured that with approximately 40 days until Election Day, this is still the case.

• An actual example -- in Frederick County, MD -- of the energy from this election reinvigorating local parties.
• A piece on the Student Voter Act of 2008 -- Rep. Jan Schakowski's the lead sponsor -- that would require all institutions of higher education receiving federal funding to offer students the opportunity to register to vote while registering for classes.
• An article from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern examines preparations being made for another surge in the youth vote this November.
• "Youth Activism Isn't Dead, Just Different" -- a good piece by Ned Resnikoff found on Pushback.

Thanks to Political Wire:

John McCain, when Obama confronts him with his mistake on Spanish-language Union Radio (in a radio interview from Miami) saying he would not meet with Spain, mutters "that's horseshit" twice 57 seconds into this clip. Check it out:

That's not rhetoric we can believe in, my friends.

One thing that stuck out to me in last night's debate is the refrain of "just doesn't understand" that McCain kept using on Obama. Clearly a premeditated line, I question its effectiveness.

First -- poll numbers from last night show it clearly didn't work. From the CNN poll, thanks to TPM:

Thinking about the following characteristics and qualities, please say whether you think each one better described Barack Obama or John McCain during tonight's debate:

• Was more intelligent: Obama 55%, McCain 30%

• Expressed his views more clearly: Obama 53%, McCain 36%

• Spent more time attacking his opponent: McCain 60%, Obama 23%

• Was more sincere and authentic: Obama 46%, McCain 38%

• Seemed to be the stronger leader: Obama 49%, McCain 43%

• Was more likeable: Obama 61%, McCain 26%

• Was more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you: Obama 62%, McCain 32%

The last one is the most important here. This thirty point spread indicating Obama is the candidate that is more in touch with needs and problems is political gold, especially when its in the face of McCain's repeated declarations that the Democrat doesn't understand. Not only did the last point bear out the ineffectiveness of this strategy, but so did the leadership question. McCain's "not ready to lead" theme may have been disproven by Obama's threshold performance -- clearly the leadership people gleaned from the debate didn't scare anyone. But, of course, we can expect the McCain campaign to bring up the fact that Obama is a master wordsmith and point out we shouldn't have expected anything different.

Second, for someone that doesn't understand, Obama's body language was superior. The senator was mostly looking into the camera, speaking directly to the viewers at home. And when he wasn't doing that, he turned to look directly at his opponent. McCain, meanwhile, was looking anywhere but Obama's eyes and the camera. He was acting like the event was not televised, looking out at the crowd for most of the debate. Not only that, but TPM had some readers well-versed in psychotherapy and psychology write in with their own analysis of McCain's inability to look at his opponent for any amount of time. Quite interesting:

As a psychotherapist and someone who treats people with anger management problems, we typically try to educate people that anger is often an emotion that masks other emotions. I think it's significant that McCain didn't make much, if any, eye contact because it suggests one of two things to me; he doesn't want to make eye contact because he is prone to losing control of his emotions if he deals directly with the other person, or, his anger masks fear and the eye contact may increase or substantiate the fear.

I noticed him doing the same thing in the Republican primary debates. The perception observers are likely to have is that he is unwilling to acknowledge the opponent's legitimacy and/or is contemptuous of the opponent.

Afraid of Obama?

I think people really are missing the point about McCain's failure to look at Obama. McCain was afraid of Obama. It was really clear--look at how much McCain blinked in the first half hour. I study monkey behavior--low ranking monkeys don't look at high ranking monkeys. In a physical, instinctive sense, Obama owned McCain tonight and I think the instant polling reflects that.

Obama demonstrated that he did understand the issues, especially when he was asked to name legislative priorities for his presidency, even with the financial crisis tying his hands. Obama talked about healthcare, the energy issue, and the economy; McCain talked about minutae in defense spending? This is about 7:22 in. (Apologies for using Faux News's recording -- it was what I could find in a short amount of time.)

Finally, I know I've discussed this repeatedly in the past, but I keep going back to what Millennials and young voters would think. How often do you think these serious young activists, trying to get a seat at the table and be taken seriously, are told "you just don't understand?" Keeping that in mind, it's even less difficult to see why McCain just wouldn't appeal to young voters who seek to work within the system to create change.

Yes, young voters that seek to act as change agents within organizations might be predisposed to support Senator Obama anyway; but with these comments, McCain doesn't give his campaign any chance to be seen as a credible alternative to a young voter who doesn't quite agree with Obama.

Yes, young voters are just as diverse (and maybe even more so) as the rest of the electorate and so to make generalizations can be dangerous. But being a young voter myself, and having surrounded myself with young voters both at my place of employment and in my own social life, I notice that while we're by and large not a big proponent of civil disobedience, we're still headstrong and stubborn. We don't like to be told by our elders that we can't do things or that we're too naive to understand issues. And so it's not a huge stretch to assume that McCain's patronizing tactic didn't play well with young voters.

All in all, I thought the debate was a tie. Both candidates had a few good moments. But the fact that it was a tie on the scorecard actually favors Obama in the grand scheme of things. He didn't make any mistakes, he came off looking in touch with America and as a credible leader, and he held his own against John McCain on a subject that is supposed to be McCain's strong suit.

What did you think?

Nothing says Debate like a good old fashion catfish fry and festival. Rock the Vote, today, organized a two stage hodown in Oxford, Mississippi on the Ole Miss campus in preparation for the debate extravaganza to unfold.

Word on the street was the free t-shirts and swag was the best. Who doesn't love a free shirt?

The other most common comment was about John McCain and the recet revelation that he was going to be attending. Lauren Hempkey is a strong supporter of Sen. McCain. She thought it was awesome they were having the debate because she was hoping it would bring some attention to Ole Miss, but said she would be really disappointed if Sen. McCain didn't show up.

The students have worked hard preparing the campus indeed the whole town for the media, campaigns, and eager and interested citizens that have ascended upon Oxford.

One such distinguished student is Nick Luckett. When I met Nick at the Republican Convention earlier this month he told me he went to Ole Miss and I eagerly wanted to hear about the work they'd been doing to prepare for the debate. At the time Nick was livid because students were only going to recieve a total of 50 tickets to the debate itself. Only 50!

But when I caught up with Nick today he said that number grew quickly to 150. They had many different activities to decide who got them. Different forms of quizes and bowls, and two lotteries - one for campus leaders and another for students.

Nick said the steering committee put in a lot of hard work to make sure everything ran smoothly. Having Sen. McCain say he was pulling out was not something those students wanted to hear.

"(They) were really upset to hear that John McCain might not come. A lot of us worked really hard, and we've been working for months and months. And our university has been working for a year to bring this debate here, and now for him to say he's not coming is like a slap in the face."

Ole Miss students Danelle and Chelsea were both supporting Obama in tonight's debate. That was the major reason that they thought Sen. McCain shouldn't even attend. They had heard by lunchtime that Sen. McCain was scheduled to attend but weren't sure if that was confirmed. Danelle felt like it was a sketchy thing to say. Chelsea agreed,

"Why say you're not going to come and then show up?"

"I think its pretty cool that Obama said he was going to be here even if there wasn't a decision," Danelle said.

Later in the afternoon, Josie and I met up downtown in Oxford for some awesome southern food at Ajax a diner on the square. From there it was to a coffee shop to upload our pictures and begin working with the videos we'd shot from the morning. It was there that we ran into a local reporter for the Daily Journal. He told us that tickets were so hard to come by that even the Chancellor of the College didn't get one. The governor did... but the Chancellor was still looking for ways to get in.

What I've been reading today...

• A Politico piece looks at the meltdown's impact on student loans.
• An extremely large coalition, Election Protection 2008, is now on the scene this fall to protect voters rights.
• Obama continues his ascent in today's Gallup tracking poll; he now leads McCain 50-44.
• Barack Obama's going to debate camp in Florida this week.
• MyDD has the details on the unveiling of a Voter Suppression Wiki. Check it out.
• My home state (Ohio) is in the middle of trying to make itself more marketable for businesses, but there seems to be no mention of a lightrail system or other infrastructure discussions that would go a long way toward approaching their goal.
• Paul Rosenberg at Open Left looks at all facets of the Palin Plunge.
• A nice summary of the youth outreach effort this year by Peter Dreier at Huffington Post.
• The Guardian looks at student organization on American campuses.
• Usher co-authors a piece with Tom Nelson, also at Huffington Post, on service-oriented Millennials coming together with members of the Silent Generation and older Boomers, to make a difference.
• McCain adviser: We'll balance budget by 2013, even after bailouts. That's not budgetary policy we can believe in, my friends.

Update: At the Washington Indpendent, Ari Melber confirms that a proposed interactive forum hosted by Google down in New Orleans is likely scrapped.

Micah at Tech President beat me to it, but I just want to echo that the proposed partnership between MySpace and the Commission on Presidential Debates, announced this morning, represents a step back from the innovation that we saw during the primary process.

This morning, MySpace and the Commission on Presidential Debates announced a partnership designed (theoretically) to bring Web 2.0 to the normally stodgy and uninformative Presidential debates:

MySpace and the CPD will jointly launch ‘MyDebates.org’ – a new website which will house online tools to promote deeper levels of political engagement with viewers at home. Visitors to the site will have the option of downloading a personalized application which, during the debates, will stream the television event live from the embed location (e.g. within a blog, social network, or website). The application will also provide users with an on-demand playback functionality as well as issue-based tracking, allowing users to track a candidate’s stance on issues they care about throughout the live stream. The full functionality will be available in the days leading up to the first Presidential debate on Friday, September 26.

Additionally, ‘MyDebates.org’ will feature high-quality video streaming and as the candidates are speaking, “issue icons” will light up as candidates discuss specific main topics. Users will be polled periodically throughout the debates with short questions with multiple choice answers (or iconic responses, e.g. thumbs-up/ down). This format will reduce distraction while eliciting specific and valuable feedback.

In short, here's what debate 2.0 means to the CPD:

• Debates streaming on the web.
• A rewind button.
• Embeddable widgets of said live stream
• (Potentially condescending) issue icons popping up all over the screen
• Occasional and simplistic polling that may or may not be used to determine the direction of questions.
• Tagged, searchable and embeddable clips of the debate available the next day.
• 1 debate where the candidates may face pre-screened audience questions.

Notice anything missing? How about greater, unfiltered interaction between the candidates and the audience. Web 2.0 is about social media. Meaning we talk to each other, not at each other. That's what MTV and MySpace had during the candidate dialogues last year, and that's what is missing from this proposal.

During the previous dialogues, questions from the live audience were always unscreened and never dumbed down. The polling was continuous, nuanced (the audience had six potential choices, not simply "yes or no") and was viewable at all times by the live audience, the moderators, AND the candidates. These polls were often used as a guide for follow-up questions, many of which came in over IM from the live-stream audience. It was that feedback loop, coming in over multiple channels, that forced the candidates out of their talking points and into a real conversation sans sound byte or spin. That unfiltered interaction between the candidates and the public is what made the MTV candidate dialogues interesting and informative. That kind of interaction is largely missing from this proposal.

Here's another question. Why do I want to watch these debates on a live stream of crappy quality when I could just watch them on the TV? I didn't watch the MTV Dialogues on line because I wanted to. I did it because I had to (and complained bitterly about how often the whole system crashed, necessitating a reboot of my browser). They were streamed live, but they were not aired live, and there was no other way to participate. I would be more than happy to watch the debate live on TV while participating in polling and other social features using my laptop. Or, wouldn't an SMS-based polling system work much better for a live national audience? The success of American Idol would lead me to believe so.

I will say that tagging and creating a searchable database of clips by issue and by candidate is a useful feature - especially for people to discuss the coverage on their blogs and social networks in the following days - but the rest of the proposal is pure web 1.0.