Public Please

It appears that John McCain eavesdropped on Pastor Rick’s questions at a recent question and answer session between Pastor Rick and the presidential candidates. At MSNBC’s “Forum On The Presidency”, McCain broke the “cone of silence” he was supposed to observe before answering Pastor Rick’s questions.

After winning a coin toss, Barack Obama answered Pastor Rick’s questions first. During this time, according to Pastor Rick, McCain was supposed to be in a “cone of silence”, so he would not know the questions before they were addressed to him.

But after he defined marriage, McCain asked, “Are we going to get back to the importance of the Supreme Court Justices or should I …” This is an odd question for a person who was supposed to be in a “cone of silence” because Pastor Rick had not yet asked the question about Supreme Court Justices.

It appears the proper procedure for this question and answer session was not observed by McCain. However, McCain is not alone in this regard. The moderator, Pastor Rick, did not ask the candidates the exact same questions. He prefaced the questions differently. Moreover, he asked John McCain more questions than Obama. You can watch the entire Saddleback Forum videos yourself.

It is important to point out that Pastor Rick’s forum was hardly a public forum. While Pastor Rick did collect many questions from his readership, he did not implement any democratic mechanism for their selection. For example, readers did not vote on the questions that would be asked of the candidates. Moreover, Pastor Rick’s “public” probably did not proportionally represent the public at large, or the variety of religious communities in America.

What we have is another facsimile of a public forum hosted by MSNBC. MSNBC couldn’t host a fair debate between the first round of presidential candidates, and now, they cannot host a fair forum for the presidential nominees they brought to center stage.

The communication channels of our democratic institutions are fundamentally broken, and yet we continue to clap our hands.