Wednesday, December 12, 2007

John Edwards on 10Questions.com: Another Reason I Support This Guy

I made a discovery today. I discovered a website, 10Questions.com, that allowed people to vote for individuals’ questions that they would like to see the presidential candidates answer. This was really under the radar for a lot of people – not too many people knew about it judging from the number of votes that were recorded.

It’s too late to vote for the questions, but it’s now time to get the candidates to respond to the questions. Two candidates have already posted their responses, my guy, John Edwards, and from the Dark Side, Reverand Huckabee, although the site says that Dr. Ron Paul, MD – Ob-Gyn, will also post his answers.

It really says something about the Edwards campaign, and John Edwards himself, when you see that he is among the first to respond to these questions. And THE first Democrat.

I’m going to post a few of the questions, and how John Edwards answered them, here. You can go and watch all of them there, but frankly some of the questions are pretty lame. Mainly because the only questions that appear are the ones that people voted the most for, and I think that there is a problem with that: see paragraph 1.

Case in point, the number one most voted for question on this website has nothing to do with jobs, moral issues, immigration, war, or health care. It has to do with support of net neutrality. It seems that only internet geeks found the site before the voting closed.

Here is my second least favorite question, but I liked Edwards’ answer:


Edwards answered this waaaay beyond this specific issue.



This is a question on Bush’s warrantless wiretaps.



Edwards’ answer is short, direct and to the point.



There were two questions that involved campaign finances. One was a general one about whether the candidate supported publicly financed campaigns, which got an OK answer from Edwards, OK but the answer addressed the question alone and didn’t go deeper. He went deeper in response to the other questioner which I didn’t want to show because, quite frankly, the guy is irritating and a little smug. So if you can get past personality issues here is the so-so question,



and the outstanding answer.



This guy just asked a question about voter turnout. What is the candidate going to do about low voter turnouts? I can’t believe he limited himself in this issue. This issue is huge and has many heads.



Acknowledging the fact that this is a multi-faceted problem, Edwards answered across the board: voter suppression, paper trail, DC resident enfranchisement, and other stuff that I am not so sure about.



And finally this one, a question on reducing government size. This is how I discovered the 10questions website. The guy is probably a straight ticket Dark Side voter because of the odd way he states the question: “How much would you pledge to reduce the size of government?”



Edwards gives this guy more than he asked for, and less at the same time. I think Edwards didn’t directly answer the question because it’s so odd. How much what? How much money? Doesn’t that imply increase in government size? How much time? How much attention? Edwards answered this one just fine.



So there you have it, a Half Empty version of 10Questions: 5Questions.

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