April 24, 2007

Alert: May 3 presidential debate questions needed

On May 3, the GOP presidential candidates will be debating live on MSNBC and it will be streamed live at Politico.com.

The latter site is looking for user-submitted questions for the candidates. You need to sign up, but that's free.

You can also vote up questions. Unfortunately, the current top-ranked immigration question is worthless:

What specifically would you do to secure our borders, especially with Mexico, and how would you deal with the millions of illegal Mexican immigrants already in our country?

That question can be answered by visiting the candidates' sites and asking it would just take up time. Effective questions should point out specific flaws in a candidate's positions and force them to defend those positions. And, it should anticipate the response: if a candidate can respond with their stock talking points, or evade the question, find something else.

Please submit your own tough questions, and also vote up the question I submitted. You can find it by selecting 'most recent'/'mitt romney'/'immigration' in the popups and look for this:

Do you support any form of path to citizenship/regularization/legalization/etc. for illegal aliens? Do you agree that *any* form of such legalization would be *perceived* as *amnesty* by *millions* of prospective illegal aliens around the world?

I was hampered a bit by the 255 characters rule, but that question would help reveal whether Romney support amnesty (by any name) or not, the second sentence would knock him off his stock talking points and it would also help get the importance of the perception of amnesty out onto the stage.

Posted to Politics at April 24, 2007 05:12 PM