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Real democracy: YouTube debate, Version 2.0
by Hank Edson
August 15, 2007

Worthless Currency

We all know why our presidential debates are worthless currency to the American people.

We all know that the opinions the candidates will voice are calculated not to offend the contributions made by Big Business on which each candidate’s campaign depends.

We all know that in our 24/7 corporate media culture, the power of the echo-chamber to exaggerate and repeat the slightest deviation from the conventional “wisdom” completely kills the impulse in the candidate to speak from the heart.

Thus, none of us believe anything the candidates say is really going to make a difference. Whether they get elected or not, whether they live up to their promises or not, nothing they promise will make a difference because they all have been trained to promise virtually nothing. They have all been trained to aspire to achieve almost nothing.

The presidential debate has become a brain severed from the heart, instead of a brain duty bound to answer to the heart’s calling. For this reason, every move is calculated and every move is judged, not by its wisdom, but by how it impacts the candidate’s chance of winning. Each candidate’s words are judged, not by the insight they offer, but by whether “they sound presidential.” Thus, the presidential debate has become a transaction in a currency that holds absolutely no value. It is just a game to win, not a foundation for the people’s future.

This year, the most disheartening aspect of the presidential debates is the mindless proliferation of them by the corporate media and the absolute powerlessness of the candidates to do anything but give into the free PR. We saw a similar phenomenon with the Iraq war. Then too, the cable news channels developed mindless coverage of an event that should have be confronted seriously, effectively, and definitively, not rendered meaningless by constant repetition of commentary that had no intention of speaking the real truth.

Just as we watched over and over night vision pictures of bombs falling upon their targets, this election season we watch over and over the candidates flitter away our future with a soundtrack of mindless platitudes. Like the war, the campaign now goes on for years and still, for all the debate, nothing is really said and certainly nothing is achieved. The war goes on and the candidates go on, both meaninglessly, because that’s how the corporations funding our political process want them to go on. Their democracy-corrupting and blood-soaked funds have made our candidate’s currency in the public debate absolutely worthless.

The Inflated Egos of Corrupt Politicians

A couple weeks ago, Newt Gingrich expressed harsh dissatisfaction with the presidential debate process, but his point was just the opposite from the one I seek to make here. Gingrich compared the presidential candidates to “trained seals” waiting for someone to throw them a fish, but added “I have no interest in the current political process. I have no interest in trying to figure out how I can go out and raise money under John McCain’s insane censorship rules…” and that whether he ran for President was “the country’s problem, not mine.” Gingrich went on to compare himself to Charles DeGaulle.

Gingrich’s ego leaves him grousing like a kid left out of the ball game, building up grandiose ideas about himself and ridiculing the players on the field at the same time he bristles at the extremely moderate rules the game imposes. Money is not the problem with our political process to Gingrich, the rules are.

According to Gingrich, our presidential candidates are weak, not because they are corrupted by the same corporate interests he, himself, has spent a lifetime pandering to, but because the candidates are not as dignified as the man Time magazine referred to as “the pompous thug of late night cable.” CBS’s Eric Engberg offered a similar estimation of Gingrich’s dignity, noting: "Rejecting the House's gentlemanly ways, [Gingrich] waged such constant guerilla war against the Democrats he was attacked for McCarthyism...bombastic and ruthless."

In short, Gingrich is not concerned with fixing the political process, he is angry that he has been alienated from participating in its corruption.

Notwithstanding the obvious weaknesses in Gingrich’s position, following his comments, the players for the Republican side began to back pedal out of the up-coming Republican YouTube debate. Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani objected that the Democratic YouTube debate was disrespectful of the presidential selection process. John McCain began to look for a way out of the invitation he had already accepted.

This response was again completely off target. If the questions asked in the YouTube debate in anyway disrespected the presidential selection process, it is not because the candidates consented to interact with the people, but because the presidential selection process is completely corrupt. Pass meaningless currency in the political debate and you are going to get debate questions that reflect a disrespect for the value of your answers.

The candidates are responsible for accepting the corruption. The people are not responsible to respect such candidates.

The solution is not to refuse to engage the public in political discourse in a democracy, but to address the issue of corruption and how it is degrading the dignity of our democratic culture.

But actually, I have an even better solution. Let’s re-introduce currency into the political debate that actually has some value. How do we do this? YouTube, Version 2.0.

YouTube, Version 2.0

Instead of having the public submit questions to be asked the candidates, let the public submit answers to the same questions asked the candidates. Then play the answers of both the public and the candidates intermixed so that the viewing public can judge the difference between answers that are careful not to offend corporate sponsorship and answers that are spoken with the direct concerns of the people at heart.

Real Democracy depends upon public participation in the answers, not the questions.

A YouTube, Version 2.0 debate could be orchestrated by recording the candidates answers in a closed studio. The questions asked the candidates could then be released and a week or two could be allotted to allow the public to post their own YouTube answers and for the television studio to produce a version of the debate that integrated the answers of both the candidates and the American people. Then YouTube could allow the American people to vote on the responses they liked best. That’s how we can find out how America really feels about our candidates.

To address the disrespect and disinterest the American people are showing toward the presidential selection process, we need less corruption. We do not need more campaign fundraisers. We do not need more million dollar 30-second mud-slinging, jingoistic commercials. We do not even need more debates. And we certainly don’t need an 18-month campaign season.

What we need is just a few real debates in which corporate cash is not king—a few debates in which individuals with nothing at stake (but their future as citizens of a democratic nation) stand up and speak their opinion about the best way to approach the issues.

Unlike the Version 1.0 YouTube debates, Version 2.0 would be a truly historical experiment. The Version 2.0 experiment would break open the monopolized uniformity of corporate candidates into a creative and bold diversity of ideas, common sense, idealism, and honest, rather than corrupt, sophistication.

Allow the American people to contribute answers to the presidential debates, and we will discover that the American people are extremely respectful of truly democratic political process. Our democracy will become scientific in its open and methodical consideration of creative ideas. And it will become principled and humane in its renewed focus on “the common defense,” the “general welfare,” the “blessings of liberty,” and the desire for “a more perfect union.”

Version 2.0 will make a third party candidate of the American populace. All the topics banned by corporate America will be back on the table: impeachment, universal health care, higher taxes for the super-rich, the accelerated withdrawal from Iraq, the end of Free Trade’s race-to-the-bottom global economics, and an aggressive response to Global Warming, to name a few.

It’s time we got back to real democracy and started sharing answers that have real value. We don’t need Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, or even Hillary Clinton or Barrack Obama. What we need is a political process that listens to what we, the people, have to say.

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Hank Edson is an author, activist, and attorney based in San Francisco. You can find his blog, “MP3—My Politics and Progressive Perspective,” at: http://hankedson.squarespace.com/.