Centerfield

Hectoring the Hopefuls

If we ever get around to writing a centristcratic oath, we ought to include the responsibility to hector, harry, and otherwise challenge all prospective presidents with difficult questions. Thankfully for the lazy, other more diligent folks have gotten to work on this:

Paul Waldman's Short on questions of faith cuts right to the chase on the notion of holding all pols' feet to the fire. My nutshell excerpt:

Today, candidates for the White House feel compelled to do the opposite of what Kennedy did: convince voters not that their religion will be irrelevant, but that their faith will guide them each and every day. Yet paradoxically, we've moved further and further from any substantive discussion of what it means to be led in office by religious faith...

...Candidates who tell us how important their faith is to them are hoping that religious Americans will come away with warm feelings about them. But if they aren't willing to discuss just what that faith entails, they're saying they want people to vote for them because of their religion, but they don't want anyone to vote against them because of their religion.

They can't have it both ways: either religion is important to them or it isn't. And if it is, then we as voters have a right to know everything we can about what they believe.

Amen to that, no pun intended. And over at Reason, Dave Weigel picks a high hard inside fastball for various candidates. Read them all to see what your favorite one is. Here are a trio of my favorites:

4) Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback "You opposed President Clinton's 1999 action in Kosovo, and said at the time ‘I continue to implore the Clinton administration to present a clearly thought-out exit strategy from the hostilities in Kosovo.' Why didn't you apply this standard to the Bush administration over the last six years?"

3) Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney
"When Sen. Hillary Clinton gave a mildly hawkish speech about Iran but opened the possibility of engaging with their leaders, you blasted her. ‘Advocating engagement displays a troubling timidity toward a terrible threat. The right strategy is not engagement, but economic and diplomatic isolation.' Please enumerate which other countries you want to threaten instead of engage."

11) New York Sen. Hillary Clinton
"Defending your vote in favor of the Iraq resolution, you said: ‘As a senator from New York, I lived through 9/11 and am still dealing with the aftereffects.' What was Iraq's role in the 9/11 attacks?"

I especially like the Brownback one because I often wonder about the wayback machine question...how things would have unfolded if a democratic President had decided to invade Iraq under the same circumstances as Bush.

Feel free to play "I get to pick one candidate and ask one question" in the comments. If possible, try to find a good question to ask to someone who ISN'T your favorite whipping post.