Thursday, December 13, 2007

The Value of the Fourth Estate

As the primary/caucus season approaches, one of the valuable tools we voters can use to get acquainted with our potential Presidential candidates is the series currently being run by Katie Couric and CBS News. It's called "Primary Questions" and it asks each of the major candidates the same ten questions. I've seen the segment twice on the CBS Evening News, and of course they post it on their site. [If that link takes you somewhere else, just search for "Primary Questions."]

From the few I've seen, its clear that some of the questions lead to fairly canned answers, but others reveal the personalities and beliefs of the people who want to be President of these United States.

I'm interested to see, for example, that the only candidate who thinks the topic of Global Warming is not ready for immediate action is Fred Thompson. He took the question and answered it vaguely, then turned to a comparison of the looming Social Security disaster. He argues that we know the entitlement shortfall is coming, and there are things we can certainly do about it, yet people want to spend time on climate change which we can't solve unilaterally, and which has many potential answers. I think he's behind the times when he says there are unanswered questions and we don't know if this is a cyclical change. I do appreciate that he wants to address the Social Security issue.

No, I won't vote for Thompson. But I do appreciate the Press doing this bit of work to help us compare candidates side-by-side, and outside of a debate format.

McCain is still the most attractive Republican for me. Maybe he could be in the Cabinet for whichever Democrat wins. Biden, though not getting much attention, has good answers, but I'll be surprised if he's still around on Super Tuesday. If I vote in our caucus (I've never done that before) it will be a hard choice for me. There are things I like about Clinton, Obama, Edwards and Biden. Perhaps I shouldn't be so concerned about which one is more "electable."

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