Didn’t catch the first part of it, but here are some thoughts (paraphrasing from memory throughout; transcript is being updated here):

–Joe Biden made an incredibly insulting comment about the mentally ill. A YouTube questioner asked the candidates what they’d do to protect his “babies,” held up a huge gun and said “this is my baby.” In response, Biden said “if that’s his baby, I’m not sure he meets the mental stability requirements for owning a gun. I hope he doesn’t come after me now.” Insulting someone by calling them mentally ill? Not cool.

–I disagree with Obama on everything, and I think he has some weird racial hangups, but I love watching him speak. He hit the nail on the head a few times. For example, a questioner asked if the candidates would be willing to serve their terms on minimum wage. Many said they would until Obama pointed out “we can afford to, because we all have lots of money.”

In another example, one YouTube clip asked whether the candidates had sent their kids to public schools, and they all started tripping over each other to insist they had, or at least they had a really good reason not to. (None said simply, I sent my kids to private school because I could easily afford to and it was much better than the nearby public one, AKA the truth and what most parents do.) Obama opened with “a U.S. Senator can get her kids into a good public school if she wants to.”

–On that same question, I loved Hillary’s response (which Obama was following). She said she had sent Chelsea to public school back in Arkansas, but in D.C. the family was advised to go private to keep the media away. Yeah, I’m sure Chelsea’d have gone to an inner-city DC school otherwise! (Steve Sailer was oddly prescient a week ago when he made the offhand comment, “after all, the Clintons sure didn’t send Chelsea to the local public school for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”)

–The YouTube idea had its ups and downs. There were some clever ones, but some had poor production values (in the worst ones, the filmers didn’t even do multiple takes to get their speeches off articulately). CNN went very warts-and-all, refusing to so much as sync up the audio and video. A couple were hard to hear and could have benefited from some EQing as well. The dumbest thing is that the production crew showed an entire computer screen with a tiny YouTube screen within it, so you couldn’t read any of the words.

By Robert VerBruggen