Various folks who wish to be your next President are stopping by the offices of Google in Northern California and being interviewed in a slightly different context than the norm. A month ago, I linked you to a video of the appearance there by John McCain. I won't embed the videos here but you can now view similar chats with John Edwards and Bill Richardson. Each of these runs well over an hour and begins with samples of the candidate's political ads. Thanks (again) to Tom Galloway, who I think is in one of them asking a question.
If you get a chance, you might want to read this piece over at Media Matters, which essentially says that Carl Bernstein's new book about Hillary Clinton is a mess of contradictions and a bad attempt to construct a fictional Hillary and to then force the details of reality to fit that model. I have a friend who, whenever we talk politics, always leaps to the "character issue," discussing each candidate or elected official in terms of what kind of person they are. That would matter to me a lot more if I had any confidence that we really know that.
I tend to think we know a lot less about "the real Hillary" or "the real George W." than we think we do. To the extent we can get a sense of character and personal integrity, I think we only get it from extended conversations like these. We generally don't get it from books that — like many, including apparently Bernstein's — seek to cash in on the eagerness of certain book buyers to read bad things about a candidate they already don't like. And we certainly don't get it from these game show format "debates." I don't want to cast my vote for a guy based on how he can summarize what he'd do about Iraq in 45 seconds. In fact, I'm suspicious of anyone who can summarize what he'd do about Iraq in 45 seconds.