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.