Friday, July 13, 2007

Hillary Clinton and John Edwards want to muzzle lower funded candidates.

After a NAACP Democratic Presidential Candidates Forum in Detroit, MI on July 12, 2007, a secret between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards was caught on a FOX microphone. Not aware that their microphones were still on, the following exchange was caught between Clinton and Edwards.

Edwards: "...at some point...(unintelligible)...maybe the Fall. We should try to have...a more serious and a smaller group."

Clinton: Well...we...we've got to cut the number...because they are...because they arejust being trivialized."

Edwards: "...and they're...they're not serious. They're not serious."

Clinton: "No...you know...I...I...I think there was an effort by our campaigns to do that. It got...it got somehow...detoured. We've gotta get back to it...because that's all we're going to do between now and then is that...thanks, Barack. So...we...us...thanks, Dennis...our guys should talk."


For the entire Fox report click on the YouTube video below. Entire run time 2 minutes.




Looks like Clinton and Edwards are trying to force us to choose one of them. They need to relize that we the people of this fine land deserve to hear all the Democratic Candidates and all the great ideas that they bring to the table.

I say no censorship in the debates, let us hear from all the candidates. The Democratic Nomination is not for sale and raising millons of dollars from corporate donors don't make your views on the issues the best.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Today, I'm with your guy. Even though I myself can be dismissive of Gravel and Kucinich (as a Biden backer there aren't many choices of people even lower in the polls than my guy), I still think they're good to have in the debates and fora because they rightfully challenge the other, resting-on-their-millions candidates on the important issues. Even Gravel, that wacky old so-and-so, was right, for example, to demand Obama clarify his remarks that implied military aggression toward Iran.

Good luck to you guys; I hope we all in the "lower tier" can hang in there against the moneybags.

libhom said...

Thanks for calling attention to this anti-democratic Act.

Have you heard about the One Million Blogs for Peace campaign?

http://bluepyramid.org/peace/

Aldon Hynes said...

From what I've read, the discussion is being taken completely out of context. I don't know about Sen. Clinton, but what I've heard is that Sen. Edwards was not trying to exclude any of the candidates, but to try and find a format where the issues can be seriously discussed.

The debates so far have been abysmal, IMHO. No one has been given a chance to really go into detail about their positions. Part of that is because they try too many people in too little time.

An hour debate with split between nine candidates and a moderator means that each candidate only gets six minutes. Six minutes isn't enough time for any of the candidates to get their message out.

Unfortunately, most people won't spend two or three hours watching a single debate.

So, a better format is called for. My sense is that breaking the debates into discussions with only a couple candidates per debate is a better format.

This is a separate issue from each candidate getting equal time. Even with the debate format as it is, they don't. This is illustrated very well with Chris Dodd's Debate Clock.

http://chrisdodd.com/node/1377

So, there are a few different problems that need to be addressed.

Making sure that all the candidates get an equal amount of time.

Making sure that the format makes it possible for each candidate to really get their message out.

One final thing, I think some of the candidates hurt themselves by repeating the media story by focusing on their role as 'lower tier' candidates.