Listening to yesterday’s NPR radio debate of all the candidates except Richardson (at a pre-scheduled funeral for a Korean War victim whose remains he successfully brought out of the North), it occurred to me that they were all pretty good. While I would find it hard to support Mike Gravel, since he seems to pull away from the others if they are nominated, I found none of them as caught up in small, senseless issues like the fear-mongering Republicans.
While I know Obama and Hillary are sometimes going after each other, they stayed on the three issues that NPR presented (The Iraq Situation, The Economy, and Illegal Aliens) and all of them discussed to what seemed to be their satisfaction, their views on the issues.
My response was that I could vote for just about any of them.
I liked Edwards, who didn’t blow his top and talked out his change-oriented approach. I liked Obama, who actually answered questions I thought he had avoided before. I liked Hillary’s broad understanding of just about everything.
I really liked Chris Dodd – he’d make a great President if the one issue were Spanish-speaking illegals. And Biden and Kucinich, though they were more obvious at tooting their own horns, were equally believable.
It was good that 1.)they didn’t have a lve audience – so there was no one to play to aside from the three NPR reporters who fielded questions; 2.) they responded directly to questions from callers, and the NPR team held them to the answers; and 3.) they had more time to talk than we usually get in the awful television debates.
The Republicans and NPR are still trying to come to a resolution for a similar debate… so far no go.