This perhaps drew winces in every living room in America. But it did inspire me to consider how a structured forum for questions & answers can offset some of the better-known deficiencies of press conferences. I wrote it up in a proposal called the Question Scoreboard. This page is a sampling board for questions for the President and the 2004 campaign.
What makes a good question? Good question. In the press conference there were some good informational questions ("Who will we hand Iraq over to?"), as well as the necessary questions about hard choices ("How do justify going to war without asking Americans to sacrifice to pay for it?") which still haven't been answered. There may be a temptation to come up with the "gotcha" questions like "Are you sure that's oxygen you're breathing?", but I do believe there's value in keeping this serious. And I want questions that you would pose to John Kerry as well. It's even better if you can cite an expert who's been pressing the issue for a long time.
If you are a registered member, you can add questions below and/or use the ViewPoints technology to debate the utility of individual questions. I've started with one below.
Update December 6th: George W. Bush having been re-elected, I expect these questions to remain open, and to add more to them. Ron Froomkin, writing in Salon, proposed some strategies for the press to adopt in asking questions of the President.
When will our intelligence agencies be fixed?
Four administrations of U.S. intelligence failed to prevent the tragedy of 9/11, short of getting a preparing the "U.S. Commission on National Security" and handing it to Bush when he took office in 2001. That was a failure, so lessons needed to be learned.
The CIA's assessment of Iraq's weapons capability, despite director George Tenet's assurance that "it was a slam dunk case", was politicized before being presented to the President, who brought us to war on false pretenses.
The State Department's "Patterns of Global Terrorism Report" released in April 2004 was quickly repudiated for underestimating the number of terrorist incidents, to the point of finding that last year had the lowest number in three decades. The other week Colin Powell acknowledged the error, and said on ABC's "This Week":
"We are still trying to determine what went wrong with the data and why we didn't catch it in the State Department."
Well, when will these errors start being caught?