Julie Pippert: Using My Words

Image Source: Hillary Clinton photostream at Flickr . Last night I live blogged the Democratic debate for MOMocrats , a fantastic group of writers who use their words to share political views and news---a group I am happy to have recently joined. During the debate, I noticed one of the moderators' favorite things to do was take Hillary Clinton to task for her detracting remarks of Barack Obama. Obama hasn't been a perfect choir boy during this campaign, but Clinton is the one who has taken some fairly low potshots that smack either of self-righteousness or desperation. Both self-righteousness and desperation smell like weakness and appear as a challenge. Shark like reporters and detractors scent blood. Indulge me as I backtrack for a minute here... I always had a pretty good mind of my own. But in eighth grade we moved to an environment that was harshly unaccepting of that in me. I had a choice: bend and go along to get along, or break and be alone. I chose the former. By the t...

On December 4, NPR and Iowa Public Radio hosted a debate among the Democratic presidential candidates. (Read the transcript of the debate here .) The debate was relatively civil, especially considering the amount of disagreement among candidates. I think the radio format worked well; without a live audience, candidates were more in discussion mode than performance mode and therefore I believe we got better information from them. The focus of the debate was on Iran, Iraq, China, and immigration---all foreign policy issues. This means they missed debating most of American voters' top issues, which center around issues that affect us on a daily basis. A Pew Research Center poll in November ranked the top voter issues as (read full article at Kiplinger ): 1. Economy (79%) 2. Health care (76%) 3. Iraq (76%) 4. Education (75%) 5. Jobs (71%). "Energy is rising rapidly, from 54% in 2004 to 65% in 2007." The candidates seemed familiar with this list, and proved that they are in to...