Becky Greenwald and Tom Latham just debated on WHO radio. Chase Martyn liveblogged the event at Iowa Independent.
I will have more to say on this tomorrow after I listen to the tape again, but here are my initial thoughts.
There were no major gaffes, and both candidates presented their cases well. Greenwald did a great job of staying on topic and bringing up the relevant facts on a range of subjects.
She repeatedly mentioned his loyal Republican voting record, including his many votes to continue the war in Iraq, and promised that she would get to work for constituents right away.
So, when Latham brought up the bill he co-sponsored to deal with the nursing shortage in Iowa (more on that here), Greenwald said it’s a good bill and she hopes it will get out of committee. But she added that Iowa has had a nursing shortage for some time, and if she’s elected she won’t wait 13 years to try to deal with this problem.
Latham kept going back to his vote against the bailout in order to depict Greenwald as someone who would have given George Bush $700 billion to spend with no accountability. But will the voters let Latham evade responsibility for his long history of voting for Bush’s economic policies and deregulation of the banking sector?
WHO’s selection of call-in questions was outrageous. I will try to count later, but the overwhelming majority of questioners were antagonistic toward Greenwald. Some of them ranted without any apparent question.
WHO also made sure Latham got the last word during both the opening and closing statements.
I don’t know why I am surprised, since WHO has a nearly all-conservative lineup of talk radio shows, but I expected at least an attempt on their part to look balanced.
If they didn’t want to have journalists ask questions during the debate, they should have asked listeners to submit written questions beforehand, so they could have selected more concise and coherent questions, with more of a political balance. I give Greenwald a lot of credit for not getting thrown off her game by some of the callers who were so hostile.
The station will put up the podcast of this debate on their website sometime tomorrow.
3 Comments
Yuck
I listened to the debate tonight like a few others I’m sure and then I read through the Iowa Independent live blog of it.
I have a few very brief comments that I’d like to share about the debate.
First and foremost, what happened to DesMoinesDem wanting someone to follow Tom Latham around in a chicken suit because he apparently refused to debate Greenwald back in August? Got your debate didn’t you? And now – what do you do? You complain about the callers and the format. Does anything ever please you?
Next, I was interested to learn more about the negativity that was brought up and so I went and checked out this site entitled replacetomlatham.com.
I am shocked. Shocked and disgusted. I read some of the stuff on there and thought I was reading junior high insults between two thirteen year old girls. William Meyers would have run a campaign based on issues instead of insults.
Do Iowans really want to elect someone who puts this kind of garbage on a website:
“Please stop tapping your foot, its distracting”
“Boehner and I are tanning later. Wanna come?”
“Don’t look behind you, but that’s EXACTLY the goatee that i want to grow.”
This kind of stuff is outrageous. William Meyers would have run a more honorable campaign.
Iowans are sick of the partisan name calling. We have a financial crisis on our hands and we have troops engaged in a war with terrorists and what do I find on replacetomlatham.com? Not substantial policy statements but highly inappropriate content.
I’m lucky that all my kids have grown up and moved away – otherwise I’d have to block that site because of some of the questionable content.
I give the debate to Latham – handily. He had command of the issues and did a good job pointing out his bipartisan record of achieving results for Iowans. I like that. Latham gets the job done without seeking the camera or the microphone.
Latham is looking better and better to me everyday and I didn’t think I’d be saying that if William were still around. William dropped the ball and after seeing Becky’s inappropriate and somewhat juvenile website – my support for Latham is definitely growing.
bill-spencer Tue 7 Oct 1:01 AM
I'm glad Latham agreed to a debate, finally
but clearly he wasn’t willing to debate on neutral territory. A conservative talk radio station is not likely to send any tough questions his way.
I guess by “had a command of the issues” you mean “consistently ran away from his lockstep Republican voting record.”
desmoinesdem Tue 7 Oct 8:41 AM