CNN / YouTube Republican Debate On Wednesday - Not Too Late To Get In Your Video!

A creation of The CNN / YouTube Debate System

On Wednesday, the CNN / YouTube Republican Debate will be held in St. Petersburgh, Florida. This is the long-awaited second of the debates of the successful CNN / YouTube partnership. I expect the star of the debate not to be the videos, but exchanges between Ron Paul and the other GOP candidates -- forget the "Quarter Question."

As some of your know who are regular visitors to this space, my question -- "The Quarter Question" -- was part of the Democratic CNN / YouTube debate process. And as some of you remember, I was a guest on the CNN Roland Martin Show as well as on local Channel Five here in Oakland. So basically CNN and YouTube launched my career as a political commentator. But because of that, my questions may not be picked this time around. I submitted nine of them, and I've got one more up my sleeve before the November 25th deadline.

Which reminds me to tell you that there's still time to get your questions in. Regardless of what CNN does with me, I think it's the greatest debate format ever done and is so right for its time, it could not have been done even four years ago.

Now as far as advice, my suggestion is to stick to questions that concern the Republican Party. I've noticed that a heck of a lot of the submissions -- including mine -- have a "democratic" bent to them. I also read in the NYTimes that CNN Washington Bureau Chief David Borhman has stated that questions which pander to CNN will be rejected, so that excludes one question I submitted and was inspired by a segment of last week's "CNN Situation Room."

But, in their racially ignorant way, the NYTimes -- which employs a writer who managed to present me as two different people in two consecutive paragraphs in an NYT article before the last CNN / YouTube debate -- managed to miss the obvious question to ask Bohrman: if by picking questions that deal with "Republican Issues" they will skip questions concerning race. At a time when the party's beset by divisive questions regarding how it treats African Americans, I can't imagine a debate that avoids that issue.

We shall see.

CNN/YouTube Debates - CNN Not Community Should Pick Videos

Read the latest update on the debate process from CNN!


I listen to NPR and heard CNN Washington Bureau Chief David Bohrman talk about the upcoming CNN / YouTube Debates on Wedneday of this week of this post.

The anchor paired him -- for a moment -- with Joshua Levy from TechPresident.com, and Josh made a statement which caused me to shudder: that the community should select the questions online.

Absolutely not.

The reason I state this is that as one who works online, has been a YouTube contributor, and make simulations online for students in the classroom, I can tell you that people send to vote with their libido.

In other words, if the question's posed by a lovely white woman, it's more likely to be selected over a question by someone -- like myself-- who's black and male, and this even if the former's question was not in compliance with rules!

YouTube seems to attract a segment of society that not only is racist, but expresses it in different ways. This is not the majority, but it's a group that's disproportionately young and very misguided. But that group aside, the habit of clicking on a cute female face is the number one YouTube habit.

Thus, it's good for CNN to be "the leveler" if you will. I've never favored "mob rule" and I certainly advise against it here. If you look at the range of questions asked thus far, the vast majority concern education, as well as -- I count -- at least 25 on Darfur!

People use this event as a medium to communicate their personal concerns and not so much questions that we can use to determine who the best presidential candidate is.

At any rate, keep up the great work on this, CNN and YouTube (Steve Grove, specifically). Also I must add that the number of submissions is about the max you're going to get for this. It may be at about 2,000 by the time the deadline's reached. Given that there are four barriers to entry: time, equipment, knoweldge, and software -- and the marketing effort, which is great -- the number of respondents dwindles to about that number we see.

Also, I'll bet $$ that about 50 percent of the questions were made with Apple Computers, as it's easier to make a video because Macs come equipped to cause that. I have two Mac Books, for example. I can tell when a submitter used a MacBook by where their head's placed in relation to the camera.