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Thursday, May 01, 2008

12 Questions for Barack Obama

Too bad George F. Will didn't get to host the last Democratic Party debate. Instead of the softball questions from former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, Will would have exposed both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the phonies that they are.

Will's latest column in Newsweek magazine poses a series of questions to the presidential questions. Substantive questions that would force the candidates to come clean.

First up is Barack Obama.

Here's an example of what Will would ask Obama: You say, "The insurance companies, the drug companies, they're not going to give up their profits easily when it comes to health care." Why should they? Who will profit from making those industries unprofitable? When pharmaceutical companies have given up their profits, who will fund pharmaceutical innovations, without which there will be much preventable suffering and death? What other industries should "give up their profits"?

He also wants to know how Barack and Michelle Obama really feel about the country they say they want to lead: Michelle, who was born in 1964, says that most Americans' lives have "gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl." Since 1960, real per capita income has increased 143 percent, life expectancy has increased by seven years, infant mortality has declined 74 percent, deaths from heart disease have been halved, childhood leukemia has stopped being a death sentence, depression has become a treatable disease, air and water pollution have been drastically reduced, the number of women earning a bachelor's degree has more than doubled, the rate of homeownership has increased 10.2 percent, the size of the average American home has doubled, the percentage of homes with air conditioning has risen from 12 to 77, the portion of Americans who own shares of stock has quintupled … Has your wife perhaps missed some pertinent developments in this country that she calls "just downright mean"?

Bill O'Reilly said the other night that this election is essentially a choice among the lesser of three evils. Let's put each candidate in a room with George Will and allow them to answer some of these questions before we pick the next leader of the free world.

Read the full column here.

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