Barack Obama could have been easily defeated. The problem was that many people concentrated on ineffective means to oppose him and no leaders pushed effective plans. There were many effective ways he could have been defeated, but the most effective would have been for people to go to his public appearances, ask him tough questions on video, and then upload his response to video sharing sites.

Obama was rarely asked anything remotely approaching a really tough question, and he was never asked a "prosecutorial-style" question that would have called him on his lies or the hugely obvious flaws in his policies.

If that had happened, the graphic above would have been the result. Imagine that the most viewed videos for the month of October at Youtube had been those. Would Obama still have been elected? I think even the most devoted Obama fan would be forced to admit that he would have lost in a landslide.

It was actually fairly easy to have created such videos, if enough major sites had promoted the idea. However, instead of pushing a plan I posted on October 1, those sites engaged in various ineffective, time-wasting ideas. And, some go even further, trying to dissuade people from holding politicians accountable, such as the so-called "libertarian" (and so-called "reporter") Dave Weigel (reason.com/blog/show/130075.html).

There are certainly valid reasons why many people wouldn't want to be the ones to ask a politician a tough question: they don't want to get as famous as Joe the Plumber, or go through the hassle he was put through initially, or the like. However, there aren't too many good reasons why leaders wouldn't want to promote this plan.

Some of them might not be interested in pushing the plan due to business reasons: they're trying to launch a supposed alternative to the MSM and they don't want to rock the boat or face access restrictions so instead they concentrate on milquetoast talking heads shows featuring low-grade pundits.

Others might be partisan hacks who realize just how dangerous this idea is: asking tough questions of the other side would result in tough questions being asked of their side. In a way, that's a form of MAD: Democratic partisan hacks implicitly agree not to ask the Republicans tough questions, and vice versa.

And, due to an MSM diet, some might not understand what a tough question is. For an example of asking a tough question that revealed a flaw in someone's policies, see this. I asked a largely unknown promoter of guest worker programs about one of the side effects of that program, and her answer showed that she hadn't thought through the impacts of those policies. If I had asked that of Obama and had gotten it on tape, the result would be like the ones pictured above, especially after I'd asked why we should support his policies when he clearly hadn't thought them through.

Waiting for the mainstream media to ask politicians tough questions is an entirely losing strategy. On the other hand, if regular citizens got in the habit of calling politicians on their lies and the flaws in their policies on video, that would have an extremely healthy impact the entire U.S. system. Politicians would no longer feel free to lie or promote obviously flawed policies.

So, even after the election, grab a video camera, think up really good questions, and get out there and ask them.

UPDATE: No, Obama was never asked a tough question and he was never called on his long series of lies to his face. See the bit above about some people being unable to recognize a tough question.