The following debate between Adolph Reed, Jr. and Melissa Harris-Lacewell on Democracy Now! is linked to here. For those of you with about 120 megabytes of room on your hard drives, and have the mpeg 4 codec, you can download it here. Reed thinks Barack Obama is incapable of getting elected to the presidency, on the grounds that he is a phony who won’t be able to withstand the inevitable Republican Noise Machine (though he thinks Hillary Clinton won’t be able to, either, for the same reason). Harris-Lacewell takes the opposing point of view.
The debate begins exactly twenty-one minutes into the program, so if you’re impatient to get to the discussion that’s the point at which you’ll want to start. I think this is a fascinating debate, and I wish we could see its like on the mainstream news channels such as MSNBC and CNN. I posted the transcript of the debate at my forum, if you’d like to read it.