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Beware the Town-Hall Debate
As Barack Obama and John McCain prepare for tonight’s town-hall debate, Slate’s John Dickerson offers a reminder of just how delicious the forum can be. It was in 1992 that Denton Walthall—a voter immortalized as “Ponytail Guy”—rose from the audience to assail George H.W. Bush on national TV. Indeed, vis-à-vis the toothless questioning of Gwen Ifill, the town hall is a forum where voter rage bubbles to surface. “[T]he questions from the crowd can easily be turned into ‘moments’ that journalists cling to for weeks,” writes Dickerson. And while the candidates might ignore Ifill, they dare not ignore Joe Sixpack.
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