We find this whole business about Hillary Clinton's camp planting a questioner(s) that has captivated the mainstream media a bit amusing. That's because planting questioners is pretty standard practice.
Every campaign attempts to control the candidate's image and message, while concurrently trying to throw the opponent(s) off theirs. When a candidate is doing a radio interview, town hall, debate, or any other public event where he can be directly engaged by voters, you can bet that every campaign wants to get their "voters" engaged. Now admittedly, the practice of planting supporters to toss softballs like Clinton did here is less common than planting supporters against another candidate, but does it really surprise anyone?
I guess what this brings up in my mind is do other candidates (current or past) script questions for their supporters to ask? In this case, the individual was redirected from the question that she wanted to ask to one that Clinton was prepared for.
While it IS standard practice to stack meetings with supporters, I do not know of instances where people were given questions to ask, that person was identified by the candidate to ask the question and then the candidate denied knowing anything about it afterward.
This just demonstrates the character of Clinton.
Posted by: Joel | November 13, 2007 5:21 PM | Permalink to Comment