Hey, first diary! I'm a big listener of liberal talk radio here in Madison, WI, and the most popular liberal talker is the center-left Ed Schultz. Today Ed brought up an intriguing proposition much like something I've often thought of myself:
Ed wants to have on each of the Democratic presidential candidates, one at a time, for his entire three hour radio program. It is unlikely that all will want to do so, as many are occupied with raising money and whatever else it is they do. But the idea really got me thinking.
I'm thinking of starting a life in politics in the future (hey, I'm 23 and going into my first year of law school. Cut me some slack!).
One of the ideas I thought of when I would dream, "what if I were running for president?" was taking advantage of as much free press as possible. Taking the above fundraising issue into account, you have to figure that monies raised would be paid, in large part, to increase media coverage anyway. So what have you got to lose?
Ed Schultz averages a million listeners a week. People demean liberal talk radio, but Randi Rhodes (who does not have as many listeners as Ed) gets more listeners than Keith Olbermann gets viewers. This is a pretty wide audience, and a good demographic of likely voters. Ed is offering three consecutive hours of uninterrupted promotion on his widely-listened to program. If I'm Mike Gravel, I'm all over it like white on rice. I would think this is definitely true of all four of the lower tier candidates, but I'm not sure about the top four.
So, why? Are there reasonable excuses to not participate? I suppose some candidates' public personas are too finely honed to allow callers to ask questions and force them to speak off the cuff for so long. It is a lot of preparation time. But hey, if you're real and you're concerned about America and you want to reach out to - and listen to - a good slice of it, this seems to me to be a great method.
What do you say? Please leave comments.
New! Kucinich is the first to accept the offer - he will be on Ed's show on September 12. I'll be there!