Immanuel Wallerstein | Commentary No. 222, December 1, 2007
The United States is going through two sets of debates among presidential candidates, one set each for Democrats and Republicans. These debates usually have journalists as conveners and questioners, and the journalists seek to force the candidates to commit themselves on supposedly difficult choices. These “difficult” choices are regularly formulated in ways that they are media traps, sometime maliciously so.
A typical example occurred on Nov. 14 at a Democratic debate presided over by Wolf Blitzer. He posed the question, “Are human rights more important than American national security?” Obviously, the answer Blitzer was forcing was the pseudo-patriotic one that national security took precedence over everything else. Bravely, Richardson voted for human rights. But Dodd, Biden, and Clinton all said it was obvious that national security was the primary consideration. And Obama said the two considerations are complementary. Kucinich was cut off from answering.
No one said the question was an absurd one, in two different ways. First of all, was it a question about foreign policy? Or was it a question about U.S. internal policy? Blitzer and the candidates assumed it was a question about foreign policy, at the moment a question about U.S. policy in Pakistan. One person tried to shift the ground to internal policy, but he was not allowed to do this.
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