In Which We Can’t Get Enough of the CNN/YouTube Debate

• Garrett Graff, writing in the Politico, says that tonight is “an important opportunity for the Republican Party to demonstrate that it’s willing to meet Americans on their own terms, take challenging questions from real Americans, and engage in the online world where people are spending more and more of their free time.” Amen to that! In last summer’s Democratic YouTube debate it made a big difference for the candidates to have to directly respond a question about health care coming from a cancer survivor rather than Anderson Cooper. It made the question less abstract and more meaningful. Now if the public could just play a role in actually selecting the questions…

• We should remember that the Republicans might not have been engaging in this debate at all were it not for the good work of the Save the Debate group, headed by techPresident contributors Patrick Ruffini and David All and Eyeon08’s Soren Dayton, among others. The coalition pressed reluctant Republicans, led by Mitt “Bad, Scary Snowman” Romney, who weren’t initially into the idea of answering questions submitted on the darn tubes.

• In another piece from the Politico, Michael Calderone talks to Anderson Cooper, who will once again host. “This whole Internet thing has been around for a while, if I understand,” Cooper says. I think that’s a joke. “I think the candidate that rejects it looks out of touch and foolish.” And debate executive producer David Bohrman thinks the candidates shouldn’t worry about another snowman question. “I think the snowman was a great question. It opened the door to a debate on global warming,” he says. It’s true, but we can we please move beyond the snowman already?

• Meanwhile, Wired’s Sarah Lai Stirland notes David Borhman’s well-documented skepticism about letting the public select the questions. “If you would have taken the most-viewed questions last time, the top question would have been whether Arnold Schwarzenegger was a cyborg sent to save the planet Earth,” he told Stirland. That may be true (and unverifiable), but as we documented yesterday, almost all of the most-viewed questions this time around are serious and response-worthy.

• Bohrman does make a good point about online troublmakers. "When I was at Pseudo, and we ran live video chats, we had (people typing) 'F*** You' in 98-point-type, which appeared on the screen,” he told Stirland. But again, it hardly seems like the only solution is to completely shut down the public’s participation in the voting process. Other community sites — including our own 10Questions — have developed creative solutions to let the community help monitor content. Could CNN and YouTube really be basing its decision, in part at least, on a bad web experience Bohrman had years ago?

• Despite Bohrman’s assertion that CNN will be weeding out "Democratic grenades and gotchas, because that's not appropriate for what this is," Stirland finds a number of pointed questions — grenades? — that either come from Republicans or have a non-partisan tinge. One thing’s for sure — there are a lot of good submissions this time around.

The Web on the Candidates

• Amidst all of this attention paid to YouTube this week, we shouldn’t forget that it isn’t by any stretch the only online video operation being used for politics. As tech site Mashable’s Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins reported, Barack Obama streamed yesterday’s three-hour foreign policy event on UStream, which is kind of a YouTube for streaming video, and several Republican candidates will be using it as well, and will use UStream’s chat room to communicate with supporters. Hopkins points out that, while Facebook’s recent partnership with ABC has been greeted with skepticism, YouTube and UStream’s political moves have been successful. “Several candidates are actually using social media to engage their potential constituents - and that’s forward progress in today’s pre-packaged political day and age,” Hopkins writes.

• Videoblogger James Kotecki was given the enviable opportunity to curate the YouTube homepage. He selected videos that he says represent the best of YouTube’s online content. He produced a video — showing clips of his faves, and while some of them are funny (except for the annoying Jackie Mason), the real highlight is getting a look at James sitting in a bathtub, drinking champaign, surrounded by oodles and oodles of possibly artificial bubbles. Is all the fame and recognition getting to his head? Nah!

• The Democratic National Committee is compiling a massive video library of the top Republican candidates’ campaign appearances for activists to pore through, and it just launched a great new site called FlipperTV to make it easy for them do so. Click on Fred Thompson’s head and you get scores of videos, most of which are very long, that anyone can download, mashup, and send around. The DNC, which thinks of this as an exercise in crowdsourcing, is banking on the idea that there just may be some gotcha-worthy moments in all of this footage. Will the RNC return the favor with a similar project?

The Candidates on the Web

• Today in a conference call to reporters John Edwards announced a new site called America Belongs to Us. It’s part of a new campaign to call attention to Edwards anti-lobbyist campaign, but the site is simply a petition asking supporters to sign a pledge “to make sure that our next president belongs to the people — not the lobbyists.” It’s isn’t clear what the campaign will be doing with the signees’ names, or how else the campaign is using the web for the effort. Also, that url’s kind of long. How about something more catchy, like All Ur America Belongs to Us?

• Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have produced “how to caucus” videos that do a good job explaining why and how to caucus in Iowa. Obama offers a step-by-step Flash site that walks caucus-goers through the process, and Clinton briefly utilizes Bill in a somewhat funny video. I have to admit: the most successful videos of the Clinton campaign are the ones that feature Bill. Does that mean anything?

In Case You Missed It…

Obama’s videotaped foreign policy forum from yesterday is a wonderful use of the web to share content and invite discussion, writes Zephyr Teachout.

Zephyr also announces that, instead of continuing to rant about the woeful state of campaign coverage, each week for the next two months she’s going to pick out one or two articles that represent model political reporting.

As we all know, although the public submitted video questions for tomorrow night’s CNN/YouTube debate, CNN’s producers decide which questions will actually be asked. But what if the public had more of a role, and the questions were selected based on the number of views?

The Obama campaign has introduced a cool new Flash tutorial to walk its supporters through the Iowa caucus process, reports Dan Manatt.