What's The Diff Between A Town Hall Discussion And A Debate?

[remember2000forever]

Do Discussions Have Mediators? Do Town Hall Discussions Take Questions From An Audience? What's The Down And Upsides?

[Vincardog]

1. In A Town Hall Discussion the questions are planted in the audience in a debate they are planted

with the moderator.

[librechik]

2. heh. sadly yes n/t

[remember2000forever]

5. Thanks! Sounds Like A Load of Fun.........yeah, right.....

[liberal N proud]

6. Perfect analogy

[Warren Stupidity]

3. In a nutwork debate republican operatives ask all the questions

In a toonhell debate, republican plants only get to ask some of the questions.

[leftofthedial]

4. ambiguity and spinnability

debates are "pre-spun" by the moderators

town hall discussions require the oligarchy to plant shills in the audience and to spin during and after the fact

[robinlynne]

7. I saw a discussion on pbs about this. They said MCCAin does really badly in a traditional debate

format and Barack is a great orator, so that is the reason McCain is pushing to change the format of the debates.

[KharmaTrain]

8. I'm Still Waiting For A Real Debate

Not a gotcha session hosted by television asshats. There have been few debates of substance...first due to the large cattle call of candidates and then due to the media's obsession on the trivial...the personal. Any discussion of health care gets drowned out by flag pins or a screaming reverend. Any honest discussion about Iraq gets snowed over by a media that is loathe to admit their role in this disaster and allows the GOOP to frame the debate in its parallel universe of "the surge is working" bullshit. There's no real honest discussion in any of these venues.

To my knowledge a town hall wasn't necessarily a candidate meeting but one of common citizens meeting to speak freely on local issues. It's supposed to be a free-wheeling arrangement where everyone is involved in the discussion and meant to be spontaneous and open-ended.

A debate is more structured...sticking to rules and issues and done in several formats. It can be the candidates being questioned by a moderator, questioning each other or answering predetermined ones. It's more an exercize in style than in content.

The fine thing about Senator Obama is he's an upside in any public venue. It's so refreshing to hear someone speak clearly, articulately and with vision...compared to Gramps with his stale old bridge to the 19th century.

[notesdev]

9. The pretense

That the 'town hall' format has regular citizens asking the questions rather than simply substituting hand-picked questions from non-professionals that the 'moderators' wanted to ask anyway.

[Rage for Order]

10. I read somewhere last week...

Can't remember where, that one suggested format was to let one candidate speak for an hour, then let the other candidate speak for 1.5 hours, then give the first candidate a 0.5 hour rebuttal period (I think this is how the Lincoln/Douglas sessions were done, but again, I'm not certain about that). I'm assuming that would then be followed by a Q&A session.