US Democratic presidential hopefuls debate Iraq in online meet

Published: Wednesday April 11, 2007
[link to rawstory.com]


US Democratic presidential candidates offered ways out of the Iraq war Tuesday during a "virtual" town hall meeting, in another sign of the Internet's growing role in the White House race.

The town hall meeting is a staple of US presidential politics in which candidates interact with ordinary Americans, but the left-leaning group Moveon.org took the tradition online in the first of three virtual forums.

The top Democratic contenders, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and 2004 vice presidential candidate John Edwards, were among seven candidates who faced off, fielding questions from Moveon members.

Obama used his time to take a thinly veiled swipe at one of the top Republican candidates, Senator John McCain, over his relatively rosy assessment of the security situation in Iraq after a recent, heavily-guarded visit to a Baghdad market.

"The idea that the situation in Iraq is improving because it takes a security detail of 100 soldiers, three Black Hawk helicopters and a couple of Apache gunships to walk through a market in the middle of Baghdad, is simply not credible and it's not reflective of the facts on the ground," Obama said.

Clinton said the Democratic-led Congress should pressure Bush to sign pending legislation that ties Iraq war funding to a timetable for withdrawing US troops.

"If the president won't end this war, when I'm president I will," she said.

Edwards, a former senator, opened the town meeting saying the Democratic-controlled Congress should "stand firm" against Bush and use its power of the purse to force the president to pull US troops out of Iraq.

Senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, along with Representative Dennis Kucinich and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, also took part in the town hall meeting, in which the candidates could be heard but not seen.

Instead, web viewers saw a web page with a blue map of the United States as background.

It was another sign of the crucial force the Internet is now playing in US elections, with politicians like Clinton even first announcing their presidential candidacies online.

But the effect is not all positive. Some candidates' faux pas and objectionable statements can be constantly repeated and magnified when they show up posted on popular video websites such as YouTube.

Moveon.org is the brainchild of two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who founded the group in September 1998 out of frustration and anger at the attention paid to the sex-and-lies scandal surrounding then-president Bill Clinton.

The group, which has 3.3 million members, said it would hold two other virtual town halls, on health care and global warming.