George Stephanopoulos defended his performance last night by suggesting that the questions during the first hour were all about "electability." Ed Kilgore has along reply at TPM, but I'll offer a shorter on.
Electability isn't measured by candidates responses to inane questions from professional pundits. It is measured by the people of the United States through 50+ state primaries. We've already held nearly 40 elections. As it turns out, we already know that both candidates are electable. That's why the race has been so damn close.
As for this ridiculous notion that the candidates are so similar that there's nothing substantive left to say, I'm sorry, but that excuse betrays a massive failure of the imagination.
We could have had an entire debate on science. Or the environment. Or the economy. Or foreign policy. Or any of a million other subjects. Absolutely, the candidates have information about all of those subjects on their web sites. But so what? Is there no value in having them talk to one another in detail about the subjects on national TV?
The job of our political media is not to create drama, nor is it simply to entertain. Its job is to educate people. Last night, they failed to do that in a massive way.
UPDATE: Oh yeah, and then there's the actual data about what people actually want from a campaign. Not that anyone at ABC apparently cares.
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