Drum Roll, Please

Last week, inspired by a reader’s comment, we suggested a three-step exercise to help us learn more about how the various presidential candidates, if elected, would actually govern.

Step #1 was to compile a list of five questions to pose to each of those candidates. From a pool of nearly 50 suggested questions we received from TMV readers and contributors, we applied a bit of democracy to the process (with help from an Excel spreadsheet) and culled the list back to our original target of five.

To avoid taking up too much space here, we’ve posted a draft of the list at Central Sanity — and we’d certainly appreciate any additional review and input you might have to offer, before we finalize that list and move on to Step #2, i.e., actually posing the questions to the candidates.

A few notes to keep in mind as you review the draft list …

1. The categories of inquiry are listed in order, based on the number of “votes” they received.

2. At the encouragement of several commenters, the questions were drafted broadly, to accomodate a variety of sub-issues and hence responses, giving the candidates flexiblity to focus on the elements of these issues they consider the most important.

3. We recognize that one of the risks of asking broad questions is receiving broad answers in return. Accordingly, when submitting these questions, we will caveat them with a request for the candidates to be as specific and detailed as possible. (And those who aren’t will be judged accordingly.)

4. The diversity of suggestions we received forced us to make some tough choices in order to keep the final list to five questions. Granted, we could have expanded the list to more than five questions, but in the end, we felt a shorter list gave us a better chance of securing responses. The good news: If this exercise proves popular with the candidates — and if readers hunger for more information on certain topics — we can always refocus and repeat the exercise, as the campaigns move forward.