Presidential debates to hit online

Now maybe they could get Stephen Colbert to host this thing and they’d be all set. Yahoo!, the Huffington Post and Web magazine Slate said today they will host two online presidential debates – one for Democrats and one for Republicans – that will feature candidates participating from separate locations with a real-time connection to voters via the Internet. Colbert may not get his shot as PBS host Charlie Rose has inked a deal to moderate the debates, and invitations have gone out to the announced candidates in both parties to participate. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the Democratic debate will occur after Labor Day, with the GOP edition at a later date. According to published reports the 90-minute online debates will will be the first in the history of presidential politics where the candidates and the moderator won’t be in the same room – or even the same state. Rose will be in one location, hooked to a video camera, while a Yahoo! crew will be at each of the candidates’ locations with cameras to connect them. Rose will receive e-mail questions and pose them to the candidates, and the debate will have other interactive components and social-media platforms surrounding it on Slate, the Huffington Post and Yahoo! Democratic National Committee chief Howard Dean has agreed to open the Democratic debate, which Weisberg takes to mean that it’s likely that most if not all the candidates will participate. The requests for debates have been so heavy that Dean has been appointed arbiter to decide who will get to sponsor the debates and limit them to one a month. The online debate story followsa number of Internet-related political happenings..For example, MySpace launched a U.S. presidential campaign site last week, and it has the potential of reaching millions of people who don’t otherwise go to political Web sites. YouTube recently announced You Choose ’08