Check this out. It's a question to Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter during a debate with President Gerald Ford in October 1976: "Governor, by all indications, the voters are so turned off by this election campaign so far that only half intend to vote. One major reason for this apathetic electorate appears to be the low level at which this campaign has been conducted. It has digressed frequently from important issues into allegations of blunder and brainwashing and fixations on lust and Playboy. What responsibility do you accept for the low level of this campaign for the nation's highest office?"
That's a fucked up question right there. It alludes to Carter's interview with Playboy magazine, when it was still filled with nekkid womens, and Carter saying that he had committed "adultery in my heart many times" (which really just means, "Yeah, I've looked at hot people and thought, 'Damn, I'd totally tap that.'" Who among us cannot say the same?). The questioner was Robert Maynard, a barrier-breaking African American journalist and Washington Post columnist who would later own the Oakland Tribune and lead it to a Pulitzer Prize.
And what did Carter do? Did he get all huffy and bloviate about how questions like that have nothing to do with the campaign and how dare Maynard ask it and what the hell is it with all these liberal journalists and their "gotcha" questions? No, he didn't. He answered the fucking question, which is what you do. Carter talked about the disenchantment with public officials post-Watergate and then he said that he had screwed up sometimes: "I've been campaigning for twenty-two months - I've made some mistakes. And I think this is part of just being a human being."
You want something more recent? How about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton debating during the contest for the Democratic nomination in 2008 on ABC? Here's a question that Charles Gibson asked Obama regarding the then-senator's relationship with a Chicago pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright (if you don't remember him, children, he was the mean Negro Christian preacher who said mean things about the United States which proved that Obama was totally a black Muslim bent on starting a race war): "[I]f you knew he got rough in sermons, why did it take you more than a year to publicly disassociate yourself from his remarks?" Obama answered the fucking question, which is what you do.
Now, here's a question that so offended somnolent surgeon Ben Carson at the CNBC debate last week. It has to do with Carson's relationship with a company called Mannatech: "They offered claims that they could cure autism, cancer, they paid $7 million to settle a deceptive marketing lawsuit in Texas, and yet your involvement continued. Why?" Carson gave some bullshit answer that didn't begin to cover the extent of his relationship with the snake oil salespeople.
But Carson used this exchange to call for a "reform" of the debates. He said in an interview this week, "Yes, the questions about Mannatech are definitely gotcha questions. There’s no truth, you know, and all they would have to do, because I know people know how to investigate, they could easily go back and find out that I don’t have any formal relationships with Mannatech."
The "gotcha" question is in the ears of the beholder. See, you might think, "Here's this thing you did. Why don't you explain it?" is a gotcha question. But that's the fuckin' game, gang. You did do something. Jimmy Carter did say he thought about balling some strange. Barack Obama did go to Jeremiah Wright's church. And fuckin' Ben Carson made a shit-ton of money hawking Mannatech products. You might not like being asked about it, and your fans might not like you being asked about it, but Carter and Obama knew perfectly well what would come up and how to deal with it. Carson's just pissed he got caught and is too much of a naif to have a ready response.
Republicans this year have lost their minds over the "format" of the debates. They're raging about the RNC's schedule and set-up. So the candidates are making up their own rules. They're demanding all kinds of shit that, if Democrats asked for them, would have been subject to unending derision. And it's all because some of the candidates don't like being asked things like "Here's this plan of yours that experts say is ten kinds of suck. So how do you think it can work?"
Tomorrow: Yeah, they really came up with a list of demands.
