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Presidential Youth Debate Answers and Details Now Online
Last month, Slashdot readers contributed their own inquiries to the pool of questions for the Walden University Presidential Youth Debate. Two of those questions made the cut, and you can watch either the individual video responses to each of the questions presented to John McCain and Barack Obama (by scrolling down the just-linked debate home page), or the whole debate straight through. For something meatier, if you are weary of predictably slippery campaign-style answers, Ethan Rowe of End Point has a very interesting blog post about the technology background of the debate.
Well, there is at least a partial answer here.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
On the term "Gold Standard"... I REALLY hate it when people keep saying "Gold Standard", which is never what it was intended to be... it was supposed to be Gold AND Silver, measured against each other... this adds an immense amount of flexibility and stability to the market, but I guess that doesn't fit with the Keynesian interpretation of Hard Money. Keynesian economists like to paint Hard Money as this antiquated, ridiculously quaint system that would never work in our modern "advanced" economic system. Utterly stupid.
Actually, the answers were of a higher quality than most I've seen them give.
McCain's response regarding the No Child Left Behind program was actually well in touch with the reasons why that program faltered. It was surprising, and more than I expected from him. However the solutions he endorsed, in his response and elsewhere in his policy, do not actually address the problems as he described them here. Obama's response to the same question was, by contrast, boilerplate about reform, including rhetoric about increasing the funding for schools and the pay grade for teachers. Neither point makes sense - we already toss quite a lot of money into schools, relative to other countries, and district performance varies WILDLY even among similar funding levels. The issue is just more complicated than a matter of funding.
On the other hand, I was greatly irritated at McCain's response to the question about women's health care. He was practically schizophrenic, talking about helping "challenged" women on the one hand, and then declaring that life begins at conception and all life is sacred on the other. He even trotted out that tired old pony of "partial-birth abortion". He also stood in OBVIOUS contrast to Obama, who described a holistic approach point-by-point and then made it quite clear that he would defend Roe vs. Wade and abortion rights in general. The candidates are markedly different here and your choice between them will have a serious impact.
They both also clearly differed on how seriously they took the idea of workplace discrimination and harassment,
Also, Obama offered more detail on how he would create oversight for the bank bailout program, and McCain offered more detail on how he might implement VA reform. You can tell where their strengths lie - if not as character traits, then at least in terms of what they believe their voting bloc is. That information is actually of use.
Neither of them touched the prison population question with a ten-foot pole, which I found irritating. Neither of them wanted to get into the briar patch of drug law I assume. On the other hand, it was quite refreshing to hear an entire sequence of debate responses where neither candidate mentioned Iraq or terrorism.
Also, I find the complaints about the exclusivity of the debate a little disingenuous - they're mostly directed at the Democratic and Republican parties. What's up with that? The roster of participants was chosen by Walden University. Go harangue them.