Last week's Republican YouTube/CNN presidential debate revealed just how out of touch their party and the media is with average Americans. Considerable time was spent talking about immigration, guns and abortion, yet not one question about health care was asked. CNN picked the questions out of an estimated 5,000 submitted to YouTube.com, and according to an analysis of the first 3,000 questions submitted, 15% focused on health care.
I guess the debate wasn't really about ordinary people's questions. Anti-tax conservative Grover Norquist got to ask a question, but 450 people who submitted questions about health care were left out of the loop. If CNN thought they were helping voters decide how to vote, they should have picked questions relevant to mainstream Americans. Questions that represent polls like this:
Fifty-two percent of Americans say the economy and health care are most important to them in choosing a president, compared with 34% who cite terrorism and social and moral issues, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. That is the reverse of the percentages recorded just before the 2004 election. The poll also shows that voters see health care eclipsing the Iraq war for the first time as the issue most urgently requiring a new approach.
Wow! Health care has been a topic domestic issue for several months, but now it eclipses the Iraq war. CNN should fire the person responsible for picking those questions and the Republicans...well, they're just clueless. They're not even listening to their constituents.
Some voters link the issues of the economy and Iraq. Richard Scown, a 61-year-old equipment-lease broker in Las Vegas, frets about "all the money we're spending there, and all the issues we have here."
Mr. Scown, a lifelong Republican, says he and his wife probably will vote for the Democratic nominee. "The Republicans haven't shown anything yet to suggest they've got a clue about the direction we're going with the economy," he says.
Irma Lipscomb, a 79-year-old Republican-leaning voter from New Market, Va., says she and her husband were just billed $300 for their first month's delivery of home-heating oil, nearly twice what they paid monthly last winter. And while her Social Security checks will have a small cost-of-living increase in the new year, she says, "they'll take it all back for health care" -- now her top concern.
The anxiety extends into the future too:
The pessimism, moreover, isn't momentary but reflects voters' worries beyond the current business cycle. Early last month, a sobering consensus emerged from a focus group of a dozen Republican-leaning voters in the Richmond, Va., area, sponsored by the nonpartisan Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The participants unanimously agreed that they didn't think their children's generation would be better off than their own -- breaking with traditional American optimism -- largely due to the debt future taxpayers will inherit.
"Who's buying our loans?" said former secretary June Beninghove, 67. "Who's going to own us? We are going to give ourselves to another country because of debt."
Those are the kinds of questions the media should be asking Republicans, but considering the fact corporate media outlets and Republicans are joined at the hip, I won't hold my breath waiting.
