SU to host debate for house race
The three local congressional candidates will be on campus tonight to speak about issues.
The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs will host a 90-minute forum among the three potential candidates vying to be the representative for the 25th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives, which contains Onondaga and Wayne counties, stretching from the Greater Syracuse area westward along the Lake Ontario coastline to Rochester’s northeastern suburbs.
The three contenders are Democrat Dan Maffei, Republican Dale Sweetland and Green Populist Howie Hawkins. One candidate will replace incumbent James Walsh, a Republican, as the 25th congressional district representative.
Maxwell professor Robert McClure will moderate the event, along with local news anchor Donna Adamo of the CBS affiliate WVTH on channel 5, on which the forum will be televised live.
Each candidate will be interviewed one-by-one by Adamo and McClure, who will ask a series of questions and follow-ups, McClure said. They will try to get the candidates to give the best answers possible, and candidates will be asked to give specific answers.
The questions will be fair and thought out, said McClure, who has spent about two days preparing solely for the event.
‘We’re not trying to play some kind of gotcha game,’ McClure said.
Questions will include the economy and jobs, the war in Iraq, education reform and the oil crisis, Adamo said. She and McClure will try to show voters why they should care about the candidates, she said.
‘We’re going to dig a little deeper,’ Adamo said. ‘We want the candidates to come across as who they are.’
Both she and McClure will come up with questions to ask the candidates, and their different backgrounds, as a journalist and an academic, will help add to the forum, Adamo said.
Audience members will also have the opportunity to ask the candidates questions, McClure said.
‘We all come at these things from different perspectives,’ he said. ‘This allows us to broaden the questions.’
Published on October 14, 2008 at 12:00 pm
