After the Summit: In YouTube Experiment, Hill Leaders Field the Same Five Questions
BY Nancy Scola | Monday, March 1 2010
Just after last Thursday's health care summit at Blair House, the folks at YouTube corralled three of Congress' top officials -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader John Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid -- and had them answer, on video, the same five questions from the public that had been bubbled up to the top of the project using Google Moderator. Why mandates? Is health insurance a right? What effect does the threat of malpractice have? Why not do away with tying health insurance to employers, as well as to geography?
A neat aspect of the exercise is that the five citizen-submitted questions gave the Democrats and Republican involved rather specific pegs on which to hang their answers, but how the member dealt with producing the video response was up to them. (YouTube says that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was invited to participate, but declined.) All three members host their video responses on their YouTube channels, and, for example, while Pelosi was seated at a table and reading from a Mac, Reid was addressing the camera from what is either a library or an otherwise book-heavy room, and Boehner was clearly in an admittedly drab House office space.
Of course, setting doesn't matter as much as responses, and we'll let you be the judge of those. Pelosi's, Reid's, and Boehner's videos are after the jump. But the YouTube post-summit experiment is encouraging in that it gives the fractured public discourse around health care some public concerns to pivot around while resisting the urge to force ornery Hill offices into a more regimented practice. Have a look...
Pelosi:
Boehner:
Reid: