Post Debate Analysis

Last Saturday marked the first official debate in the GOP primary battle for Governor. The event sponsored by High Point University and the local GOP was a well organized, well run event. A good crowd attended and the debate was televised by News14 in part and shown the next morning. All in all it was fun to do and hopefully gave the public and the press covering it a better understanding of the GOP candidates' positions on the issues and a sense of our campaign perspectives.

Now here's this candidate's take on the day's events. All of us did a pretty good job with my wife and staff (a very scientific survey) concluding that I clearly did best at answering the questions. As Congressman Coble observed in one article, at least no one made any major mistakes despite a format in which we had no notes, no prior knowledge in advance of the questions to be asked and a quick two minutes to answer. The most challenging question was submitted by a student (and I suspect unexpected by any of us) and dealt with our positions on affirmative action in the university setting. Think fast......

One of the more interesting aspects of the process was the news coverage. While the conventional stories were written by reporters for several newspapers, the N&O sent its intrepid blogmeister to "blog" the event. As best I can tell that results, not in an actual story, but in a series of postings (still going on as of today) in which there are snippets of remarks by the candidates which then is used to get comments from other candidates. This keeps the blog moving. I suppose this is the brave new world of online journalism. Who would have thought that today's Dome blog would be featuring responses from the other candidates to Bill's answer on an education issue involving graduate students. In essence he wandered off into talking about foreign students taking post graduate slots from NC students. Frankly, I'd never heard anyone complain about that problem and thought it was just a different angle to rail about immigration. But the blog world has made it an issue, albeit minor.

While we've now meandered through that issue it's time we got back on track with the main issues of the campaign, like education. The next debate is November 6th before the Association of NC School Boards and ALL the candidates will be there including Bev and Richard. Ought to be a fine old time. Hope we don't have a drop out problem.