Why No Republican Mashup Debate?
by Patrick Ruffini :: September 24th, 2007 5:20 pmWe have had yet another online debate (YAOD), and once again, the Democratic candidates have been first to participate, with the Republicans nowhere in sight.
As the guy who was all hot and bothered about the YouTube debate snub, let me add a dose of reality to this discussion. The Republican debate isn’t happening because the Huffington Post and Slate are Yahoo’s chief co-sponsors. Something like 44 of 53 Slate staffers openly declared their preference for John Kerry in the last election. Nothing more needs to be said about Arianna’s current political leanings.
Until Yahoo! thinks to allow conservative sites like Red State, Townhall, or National Review Online to sponsor a Republican debate just like liberal sites were able to sponsor a Democratic debate, this debate is going nowhere, and Yahoo’s efforts to get the Republicans to participate are for naught.
Don’t forget that earlier this year some Republican candidates wore their refusal to participate in a Huffington-sponsored debate as a badge of honor. I can’t say that I blame them. It certainly doesn’t help things that one of their featured interviewers is Bill Maher.
Republicans were wrong to initially skip the YouTube debate because they had already participated in other CNN debates, and their reluctance looked like a snub directed at YouTube and the Internet more broadly. HuffPo and Slate aren’t utilities like Google/YouTube, but are center-left journals of opinion Republicans occasionally write for. Republican candidates of yesteryear would not have been shamed for not participating in a debate sponsored by The New Republic and The Nation, and rightly so.
So, while Yahoo! no doubt has the best intentions, their decision to accept only liberal sponsors was a poison pill that makes them look more partisan than they are, and makes efforts at instituting “balance” through a Republican debate look like little more than a charade.
For its part, conservative media must be more proactive about initiating online initiatives surrounding the ‘08 presidential race, even those that require bipartisan support. The humbling reality is that even those online debate ideas that do gain conservative support are usually started by liberals. We should be the ones setting the agenda more often.
The Huffington Post in particular has been very aggressive about owning the space for Web 2.0 innovation in the Presidential race. They were recently embroiled in another controversy surrounding the all-ClintonObama-all-the-time OffTheBus, a HuffPo-sponosored citizen journalism initiative that recently added a third liberal editor after a number of folks blew the whistle the first time. They also bought FundRace, a fundraising map mashup that first made its appearance as an independent site in the 2004 election.
If I didn’t know any better, I would almost think that HuffPo is purposefully trying to make Republicans look inept technologically by playing with willing big media partners on key Web 2.0 projects and then muscling conservatives out of the picture.
Tagged: 2008 
mashups online politics web2.0
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