I get to ask a mccain rep one question in public at a debate at my school... Any excellent ideas?
Asked by
delirium (
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)
October 8th, 2008
A McCain rep and an Obama rep are going to be speaking at my school. The students get to ask questions. I am a student.
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55 Answers
How low will your team go to win?
Who was thinking what when McCain and his team chose Palin for the VP slot?
Why, exactly, does your tax plan strongly favor the wealthiest people in the country?
How far will you go to uphold the ideals that our country was founded on, specifically, re separation of church and state? How will you convince those not of your party that you will uphold those values? How does your running mate feel about your position?
How do you justify your plan to buy all the bad mortgages from American homeowners while simultaneously pledging a freeze on spending?
Response moderated
Can you promise us that Sarah Palin will never become President of the United States?
Ask him about his experience with grocery shopping and riding public transportation. Seriously.
Our Senator is Mitch McConnell, and I regularly see him in the grocery store on Saturday mornings buying groceries for himself and his wife, Elaine Chao, who is the Secretary of Labor. We live in a very middle class area. I say good morning, and he always speaks. I ran into him in a gas station, pumping his own gas, and he spoke first, “Don’t I usually see you at the grocery?” For some reason, this gives him credibility for me.
Or ask him the likelihood of a draft, and if so, would he be in favor of drafting women?
This might be disingenuous since I really wouldn’t vote for him no matter what, but this is true (if you stretch the definition of friend to include one of your fluther friends), and is something I’d like to know…
“Senator McCain, I have a friend who works for a small company which already has a hard time paying for employee health insurance, which is only getting more and more expensive. He’s afraid if his benefits are taxed, this will force his employer to drop coverage, and if that happens, he would be forced into the private market, where he would have a hard time obtaining insurance at all, much less affordable insurance due to his diabetes. How would you ensure that people like my friend would be able to remain insured and keep his costs as reasonable as they are today?”
Oooh.
My goal is to ask a question that he can’t BS his way through. And a question that can’t easily be twisted in to some happy go lucky bait-and-switch question.
Do what I would do: waste the oppurtunity.
Uh Yes, this question is for Mr McCain: “Mr. McCain, boxers or briefs? Any color prefrence?”
Perhaps you could ask him how a man that was formerly a P.O.W, tortured, and staunchly against torture could sell out his own personal morals to gain favor with a right wing political group so he could become a Presidential nominee?
Then how about,
“Senator McCain. Your running mate is suggesting that your opponent has ties to terrorists, and your wife is suggesting that some of his votes were so scary that they sent chills down her spine. You also ran an ad called The One which was interpreted by some as implying that Senator Obama is the anti-Christ. Yet every single poll, and even Karl Rove himself, agrees that if the election were held today, Senator Obama would beat you. In your estimation, does this mean that you are worse than a dangerous terrorist, or just that Americans think you are? And if it’s the later, do you think Americans are too stupid to see that they are wrong, or just too gullible?”
For John; Would you have done a better job than Bush, how?
For the rep; There is still a subpoena out for Karl Rove, does his contempt for the laws of our nation bother Sen McCain at all?
How will you keep the $700 billion dollars from being spent on investments in China
Ooh, I got another one,
“Senator McCain, in 2000 you said, ‘Sooner or later people are going to figure out that if all you run is negative attack ads you don’t have much of a vision for the future, or you’re not ready to articulate it.’ According to the independent Wisconsin Advertising Project, during the week of September 28 and October 4, nearly 100% of your ads were negative attack ads. How soon do you think the American people will figure out that you don’t have much of a vision for the future, or that you’re not ready to articulate it?”
@dale: I wish I could GA you twice!
“Senator McCain, what do you plan to do, after Barack Obama is elected?”
That ain’t all that funny, when some of you may recall that when George McGovern was running against incumbent crook Richard Nixon in 1972, someone asked him (in an open forum) what his plans were, after Nixon got re-elected.
His verbatim reply to that reporter, was, “Kiss my ass.”
(I didn’t know that he was all that flexible.)
What bunch of stupid answers!!! Am I the only McCain supporter on the forum?
@cardinal,
it appears so.
@cardinal- your initial sentence “What bunch of stupid answers!!!” was so literate and profound, gosh darn, that I didn’t quite make it to the second one.
How do you plan to stay alive?
Cardinal, there are probably a dozen or so McCain supporters on Fluther. The rest of us are smart enough to not only see through McCain’s lies and distortions, but to have a dialogue that doesn’t include comments like “what a bunch of stupid answers.”
NYT today; Nicholas Kristof, who has spent months touring the most impoverished parts of Africa;
“The Bush administration this month is quietly cutting off birth control supplies to some of the world’s poorest women in Africa.
Thus the paradox of a “pro-life” administration adopting a policy whose result will be tens of thousands of additional abortions each year — along with more women dying in childbirth.
The saga also spotlights a clear difference between Barack Obama and John McCain. Senator Obama supports U.N.-led efforts to promote family planning; Senator McCain stands with President Bush in opposing certain crucial efforts to help women reduce unwanted pregnancies in Africa and Asia.
“In some parts of Africa, a woman now has a 1-in-10 risk of dying in childbirth. The idea that U.S. policy may increase that toll is infuriating.”
Del; There’s a question there.
gailcalled brings up an interesting topic, one with which McCain has had trouble in the past. When asked if he thought it was fair for insurance companies to pay for Viagra, but not birth control, McCain essentially stated that he couldn’t recall what his OWN POSITION on the issue was (but like Palin, he would check and get back to them). He basically told them, if you want to know what I think, check my voting record, because I’m not sure.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/09/mccain-squirms-when-asked_n_111798.html
You want to trip him up, the key lies somewhere in that issue.
Am I the only one tempted to make an obvious-yet-snarky comment regarding McCain’s personal reasons to support the need for insurance companies to pay for VIAGRA versus birth control?
With regards to the original question, I don’t think I could ask anything better than the questions already posed by the collective, especially dale.
Occurred to me as well. And thanks for the props!
No prob, your questions are very articulate. You should have been one of the “town hall” people at the debate. But something tells me you’re not undecided.
Emily – you picked up on my pro-Obama bias? Gee, and here I thought I was hiding it so well! ;)
In answer to the question, “Am I the only McCain supporter on the forum?”
I certainly hope so!
@Cardinal: I thought your response was what you were going to ask the McCain rep! Now that would have been brilliant!
@delerium – How’d it go?
I drove past the motorcade on the highway on the way home from a meeting.
I think (and I have said this before) that we should welcome intelligent disagreement. This question has clearly gotten answers that are skewed…I’d like to hear some other voices.
@gail: I totally agree. Unfortunately, I worry that the knee-jerk reaction to coming upon a large group of people who disagree with you is to say, “What a bunch of stupid answers!!” and run away, rather than staying to dialogue with those with whom you disagree. Perhaps the answers of the majority (here at least—we’ll see about the rest of the US on election day) discourage dissension, but I worry that the other voices—if they showed up in the first place—would only drop by to say how stupid we all are and bail immediately. Sigh.
I also agree. And though I have supported Obama since the day he started running, I fully support anyone’s right to vote for McCain, if McCain’s ideals are the one’s they believe in, or if they feel McCain is the best choice to run this country. But I don’t support beligerince, debate is great…if you have substantive issues on which to disagree, bring them forth, we can all go back and forth on them and see what sides we end up on…that is positive. But if you just crap on everyone else’s opinion without supporting your own, how can you expect to win the argument?
It seems to me this is what has happened from the top down. Bush and Rove set the precedent of win at any cost, character assassination of your opponent. John McCain used to agree with that when it was his character being assassinated. Now even I’m getting phone message from the GOP telling me how dangerous Obama is because he once worked with a guy who when Obama was 8 years old engaged in domestic terrorism. You know, McCain has his own ties to a 60s era radical, that man, I forget his name, is dead now, but when McCain was in a POW camp, this guy was participating in anti American activities, and years later, McCain realized they had common goals and worked with him to bring about change. This is NO DIFFERENT, but McCain doesn’t want to debate the issues…he just wants you to think you’re stupid if you are going to give your vote to someone dangerous. Gee, where have we heard THAT before?
@del: I always want someone to ask the candidates “How much does a gallon of milk cost?”
breedmitch, I think that’s what brought down Dubya’s daddy. He had no idea how much a gallon of milk cost. And he also had a big photo op where he lived on food stamps for like a week or something to show people how well the lazy welfare bums have it. Didn’t pan out so well for the old man.
It hasn’t happened yet…. i’m still picking my questions. I have to be careful about it because the mccain rep also has a lot of power over the funding my school gets. So I need to make sure that he doesn’t go away feeling like an idiot.
So you’re not even out of school and you’re already a sell out? Most people wait until their first pathetic paycheque to do that…
That’s probably why he chose YOUR school because he knows the administrators will intimidate you into playing nice.
Do you have to submit yor questions before you ask them?
Is all that funding for research on silencing people? If he went away feeling like an idiot he would have learned something about himself.
Maybe try a little sabotage and ask what McCain will do to put Obama in jail.
Why have you come to the conclusion that inflammatory rhetoric directed toward racial, social and economic divisons is the only way you can win and how does it make you the best choice to represent all Americans?.
Update: Woaaaah, as it turned out the senator, Mumper, was an absolute crazy person. Here’s an excerpt from my dad in the form of an e-mail that went around after the fact talking about the event…
“Larry Mumper managed to blame the economic crisis on Jimmy Carter and the current Democratic congress, and on ACORN.
…and had the nerve to try and tell us that Obama is actually a Muslim; he read that on a website!” (Seriously. He kept saying this. He then started freaking out and reciting the address, starting with the http.)
“In response, Congressman AuCoin pointedly said, in reference to Mumper’s Obama-Muslim tag, that Mumper’s assertion was offensive because (1) there are bunches of patriotic Muslims and (2) Obama isn’t one anyhow. There was spontaneous applause for both those points, the only such applause.
How bad was Mumper? Here’s an anecdote involving an active College Republican:
I left a few mins early to photocopy lab handouts (missed “closing statements”)...I have a student in my Bio101 lab which started at 1:00, Jeremiah Wagner, who is big-time College Republican, with stickers on his laptop, seated front and center at the event, all very good…Jeremiah said to me at the start of class that I had left too early, because I missed him (Jeremiah) apologizing to Les AuCoin for Mumper’s behavior. That was heartfelt and appropriate. Hats off to Jeremiah, our plainly decent and fair-minded “opposition” student organization principal.”
Sounds like good times! Ha. Did you ever ask a question? If so, what did you ask & how did he answer?
Del; Ohio, right? I hope that there are neutral and intelligent people supervising the voting? Mumper is a US senator? Scary.
So, has this come to pass yet? What question did you end up asking?
Ohio, yes. And he is scary. It really worries me. Ugh.
And laureth: read up. ;)
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