MTV Dialogue

I honestly had not watched MTV in years. I don't use the term "years" lightly. I seriously have not watched the channel formerly known as Music Television for probably 5 years. But, tonight, I found the nerve to tune in for an hour and a half to a dialogue with four presidential candidates appearing via satellite, to answer young voters' questions: Republicans Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul and Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Each candidate had about 20-25 minutes to answer questions people in the MTV audience asked, along with some questions that were posed online via MySpace.com and MTV.com.

I'm an Obama-supporting Democrat, but of all four candidates, I thought Huckabee did the best job. He gave off that friendly, laid back, southern vibe. He also answered the questions without quite as much fluff as the other three, including a solid response in regard to his "fair tax" idea.

I felt that Obama was not quite as solid as Huckabee, but better than both Paul and Clinton. He provided a bit more fluff than Huckabee, but still gave off a fairly friendly vibe, and answered the questions in a decent manner, including one I hadn't heard brought up before, dealing with gay marriage/civil unions.

I'd give Ron Paul and Hillary Clinton a tie for third on the afternoon. Paul is the least known of the six remaining candidates and took this as an opportunity to basically ask the young voters to give him a chance. Portions of his answers seemed well thought out, but it felt as if part or all of his answers resorted to asking/telling the young voters to look him up and give him a chance on Tuesday. Clinton gave the most fluff of all. I'm not sure if she answered one question posed to her in a straight-forward manner. When asked about why she refuses to admit she was wrong about her Iraq War vote, she basically bypassed it by saying, "You know, what we have to worry about is not what has already happened, because that's done and over with. What we have to worry about is what we're going to do now." When asked about what she had to offer outside of her experience that distinguishes her from Obama, she spoke for approximately 3 minutes in a complete circle and finished the response by talking about her experience. The final portion of each candidate's dialogue consisted of them speaking for about a minute on why the young people should vote for them. Hillary took the first 30 seconds by talking about her 1 hour online Q & A session tomorrow, which she mentioned on CNN and MSNBC, and from what I hear, the Disney Channel, ESPN, and The Playboy Channel.

I don't think the candidates were quite as informative as they could have been, but give kudos to MTV, as it was a new experience, something different, which made the most of our new technological expansions, which most of my generation is in tune with, and utilizing that to spread information to my generation in attempt to provoke them/us to get involved and get out there and vote. I'm not a fan of MTV, but am glad they did this.