What if a presidential candidate held what she billed as "the largest, most interactive town hall in political history" on national television, and no one noticed?
The untold story in the run-up to Super Tuesday was Hillary Clinton's elaborate live prime-time special the night before the vote. Presiding from a studio in New York, the candidate took questions from audiences in 21 other cities. She had plugged the event four days earlier in the last gasp of her debate with Barack Obama and paid a small fortune for it: an hour of time on the Hallmark Channel plus satellite TV hookups for the assemblies of supporters stretching from coast to coast.
The same news media that constantly revisited the Oprah-Caroline-Maria rally in California ignored "Voices Across America: A National Town Hall." The Clinton campaign would no doubt attribute this to press bias, but it scrupulously designed the event to avoid making news. Like the scripted " Ask President Bush" sessions during the 2004 campaign, this town hall seemed to unfold in Stepford. The anodyne questions ("What else would you do to help take care of our veterans?") merely cued up laundry lists of talking points. Some in attendance appeared to trance out.
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1 comment:
While he has gone after Clinton with a vengeance, Frank Rich, as he usually does, makes very good points. The "division" in the race is largely coming from the Clinton side, particularly as it becomes clearer and clearer that Senator Obama winning over more and more voters whom she took for granted and carrying forward a very serious challenge.
The issue is to defeat the Republican right, not to give them ammunition to win over working class and minority voters to McCain by playing Latinos against Blacks as machine politicians in the past played Irish against Italian immigrant voters, German Jewish as against Russian empire Jewish immigrant voters, and in some elections in my youth in the Bronx, Puerto Rican voters against African American voters, both of whom were not immigrants, the first "thanks" to colonialism the second to slavery.
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