10 Questions
How often do we gnaw our teeth and throw dinner against the wall when we hear how stupid some of the questions are that get posed to the presidential candidates? Or when a great question finally gets asked but the candidate is given a total of 30 seconds to respond?
Now, here's a little something we can do about it to turn the process around. I join with a number of other bloggers to help with the launch this week of the 10Questions campaign sponsored by dozens of the biggest blogs on the Web.
Here's how it works: Starting today, the sponsors of 10Questions are asking their millions of readers and the larger public to submit online video questions addressed to the candidates using a variety of platforms (YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo, and Blip.tv), tagging their video with the word "10Questions." The 10Questions site will then find and display those questions and enable the public to vote up or down on these submissions. At the end of four weeks, on November 14, we'll stop the voting and after a quick audit to check against ballot-stuffing, the top ten vote-getting questions will be submitted to all the major candidates.
The candidates will then have four weeks, from November 17 to December 15, to submit answers to be posted online. As those responses are posted, the public will be given the opportunity to vote again, up or down, on whether the candidates have answered the questions to their satisfaction. Users can vote on as many videos as they like, but they only get one vote per IP address. The process will end December 31.
If you don't want to make a video yourself, at least go to the 10Questions site and vote up or down on the ones you want chosen to be posed to the candidates. Either that or just grin and bear it -- silently-- the next time Wolf Blitzer boots it.
October 18th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
Wow. Someone’s got their thinking cap on. Sounds like an excellent project. Good luck.
October 18th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
Good idea. Why will the candidates respond?
October 18th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
I think this girl’s got the right way to put the issue of Social Security solvency: [from 10Questions]
http://tinyurl.com/3ynfdq
I’m sure every overcoached candidate has, in the end, at 2AM before the debate day, protested just as petulantly to his/her political consultants as this little tyke does at the end. AND gotten a similar response: “This is how you do TV, honey.”
October 19th, 2007 at 7:43 am
This could go either way..
October 20th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Great concept, I have no doubt the candidates will completely ingore it.
October 20th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
I agree with what Simon says.
October 20th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Oops. A stiletto into Rachel Sklars of the Huffington Post, courtesy of Scott Horton of Harper’s Magazine: When Critics Are Really Pumpkins http://tinyurl.com/yq2l4r
I’m with Scott on this one.
October 20th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
I’ve been watching this 10Questions site for a few days now, maybe it’s too early to say anything about patterns, but here’s what I see:
Votes at this site reflect (and therefore conflate) three or four independent variables:
(1) How important is the question to the viewers?
(2) How well do viewers feel the asker has presented the question?
(3) How much does the viewer agree with the implied or expressed message of the video?
(3) How much patience does the viewer have left?
The current leader, by a mile, is someone raising concerns about warrantless wiretapping. There is none of the narcissism and rambling of some of the other videos. Instead of doing the recording at home, she went the extra mile and did it in front of the corporate offices of a telecom company. Nice move: make it concrete. As an amateur letter-to-the-editor/op-ed, it shines.
But is warrantless wiretapping really the biggest issue in the minds of American voters? I don’t think so. How does it rank next to health care, or Iraq? It’s low. There are videos at this site raising Iraq as an issue, but some of them are being voted way down, and I think for being intolerably gimmicky or heavyhanded.
Now, once you’ve watched the currently leading video, then watched a few others to get the drift, how much time (really, patience) do you have left? Not much.
I recommend breaking the videos out into categories, like The War, Health Care, The Economy, Immigration, Terrorism, Privacy, Entitlements, Taxes, the Latent Fascism Inherent in Trying to Prevent Me from Fileswapping, What’s Your Favorite Food/Color/Music Genre/Kitty Litter, and whatever else (solicit new categories from users). Locate navigation among the categories near the top, “above the fold”, so that viewers can more easily choose and evaluate video contributions on topics of greater interest to them. This would save time for the viewers, it would give each category of issue its due, and it would allow viewers to more easily vote on which questioner really represents how they want a given question to be asked.
It’s not a bad concept, really — it just needs to be organized a little better from a usability point of view. (As with so many sites out there. *Sigh*.)
October 21st, 2007 at 1:32 am
Whatever you do, don’t mention Palestine!
October 21st, 2007 at 9:12 am
The problem is that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards and most of the best and brightest political leaders in this country are enslaved by the idiocies of Democratic-Republican politics.
I say this not just because of the failures of the Democrats in Washington, but especially because of their failures right here in California. See my Op-Ed posted to the Los Angeles Times Web Site at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-walker22oct22,0,6131751.story?coll=la-promo-opinion
Agree or disagree? Leave a comment
Alex Walker
October 21st, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Disagree – pie-in-the-sky platitudes unless and until you folks who happen to be Third Party afficianados have something to show the rest of us. I agree that local independent political action is a great antidote to machines – but overall, outside of Bernie Sanders who comes from a unique political envirionment and is a de facto Democrat, whether he likes to admit it or not (has the Dem imprimatur, caucuses with Dems and will probably support whoever the Dem nominee is for President as the pragmatic choice for “socialists” like himself (left-liberal social democrats with a nostalgic twist) – you’ve got nuthin’. Except Bush’s ascension in 2004 with that extra little lift from Ralph.
It’s not so much that I disagree. I just am not interested in what is obviously well-intentioned rhetoric that’s backed up by precisely nothing you can show me. I can show you a whole bunch of liberal Dems who are actively progressive – almost as good as Bernie – despite their being a minority even in their own party. They have a hell of a lot more influence and exposure than the Greens are EVER going to get in our particular electoral (non-pariliamentary) environment. Put your energy in some sort of electoral reform that gives 3rd parties some tangible possiblity of effecting change. In the current structure, it’s about as likely to happen as space aliens coming to save us.
October 21st, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Disagree – pie-in-the-sky platitudes unless and until you folks who happen to be Third Party afficianados have something to show the rest of us. I agree that local independent political action is a great antidote to machines – but overall, outside of Bernie Sanders who comes from a unique political envirionment and is a de facto Democrat, whether he likes to admit it or not (has the Dem imprimatur, caucuses with Dems and will probably support whoever the Dem nominee is for President as the pragmatic choice for “socialists” like himself (left-liberal social democrats with a nostalgic twist) – you’ve got nuthin’. Except Bush’s ascension in 2004 with that extra little lift from Ralph.
It’s not so much that I disagree. I just am not interested in what is obviously well-intentioned rhetoric that’s backed up by precisely nothing you can show me. I can show you a whole bunch of liberal Dems who are actively progressive – almost as good as Bernie – despite their being a minority even in their own party. They have a hell of a lot more influence and exposure than the Greens are EVER going to get in our particular electoral (non-parliamentary) environment. Put your energy in some sort of electoral reform that gives 3rd parties some tangible possiblity of effecting change. In the current structure, it’s about as likely to happen as space aliens coming to save us.
October 21st, 2007 at 9:18 pm
great piece!
October 21st, 2007 at 11:19 pm
Marc — Hope your end of the city is OK. These fires in So. Cal. tonight, blow. Literately. We can smell the smoke that is torching Malibu and the canyons all the way down here in San Pedro (LA Harbor). It’s stuck in the marine layer. Sinister sunset.
Tomorrow is going to grisly.
October 22nd, 2007 at 4:04 am
oops – nothing…then doubles!
October 23rd, 2007 at 7:40 pm
It’s very grisly. In WeHo we had power outages Sunday, and now GW Bush is in the area. It can’t get much worse.