by WonkoSteve

Today the Wonkosphere is still atwitter about Thursday’s CNN demo debate. Two ridiculous themes IMHO are the softball question that one student asked Hillary, and why there were so many Clinton supporters in the crowd.

On the student issue, apparently audience members were asked to submit several questions and the directors told them which ones to ask. She wanted to ask a question about Yucca Mountain but the directors “forced” her to ask about “Pearls or Diamonds” instead. Now she is complaining about it on her MySpace Page and the conservative sphere feels her pain. Note to student: Is CNN the boss of you? Unquestioning submission to authority is a choice you can make, just don’t complain about it afterward.

Another farcical discussion is the idea that someone stuffed the audience with Clinton supporters. Matt at the Hillary Project complains

If you watched the debate — or even just saw clips — it was obvious that the audience was stacked with Clinton supporters who not only applauded her — but booed any criticism of her.

The stacking was somehow accomplished by Harry Reid in collusion with the Clinton News Network and other shadowy forces, according to other posts and comments.

We here at Wonkosphere believe that the simplest explanations are the best ones. I’m sure not defending CNN, but people, people, people, let’s have a look at the polls or Wonkosphere’s buzz share numbers, shall we? Based on that data, what happens if you take a random sample of democrats? You get 40% Hillary fans. The deck stacked itself. No need to look for Black Helicopters.

So here’s my proposal for shifting the discussion. We could talk about why it is that college students these days feel they have to do whatever some network suit tells them to do. Another good conversation would be why some commentators have never heard of Occam’s Razor and/or aren’t looking at the polls.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 11:52 am and is filed under Media, Debates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.