Lack of Lunchbox Issues at Democratic Debate

To be honest, I zoned out a lot during the second half of the Democratic debate on Sunday. The format was not particularly good, but the biggest problem was the questions being asked. They were not particularly interesting, or probing at issues of greatest concern to the voters, something E.J. Dionne picks up on in today's Chron.

But this encounter would have profited from questions posed by the old-fashioned kind of Democrat -- union workers who have faced cuts in pay and benefits, parents who can't afford to send their children to college or who work two or three jobs and can't get proper child care.

This is not a knock on the thoughtful participants whom CNN picked to ask questions. A student named Tim O'Connor asked a good one about compulsory national service and a self-employed man named Brian Sealander zeroed in on a key word in Democratic rhetoric by asking how the candidates defined who is "rich."

But the fact that so much of the debate concentrated on international relations reflects the imposition of a false high-mindedness that sees presidential-level discussions as serious only if they focus primarily on foreign policy. This throws off the balance in our politics. Many voters who want to hear a practical thing or two about schools, jobs, housing or how to cover their retirement respond to staged political events with a shrug and a frown.

The lone exception to this was the detailed discussion of health care, lasting over nine minutes, almost as much talk time as Wolf Blitzer got.

There is an overall lack of attention to issues besides foreign policy in the news coverage of the campaign. We try and highlight the best of it here, but it is a struggle to find new content every day. The reporters love the horse race and to parse the candidate's positions on Iraq, but spend little time probing the other issues of concern to voters. It is the outside groups like DfA, the Courage Campaign and Working Californians that are actually engaging the candidates on the substance. It is a shame that these debate moderators do not do the same.