Hillary Clinton’s Plants For Questions: Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff Says
HILLARY Clinton – Plants for Questions. Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, a 19-year-old at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, is talking with CNN:
She says a senior Clinton staffer asked if she’d like to ask the senator a question after an energy speech the Democratic presidential hopeful gave in Newton, Iowa, on November 6.
“I sort of thought about it, and I said ‘Yeah, can I ask how her energy plan compares to the other candidates’ energy plans?'” says Gallo-Chasanoff.
“‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,” the staffer said, according to Gallo-Chasanoff, “because I don’t know how familiar she is with their plans.”
This seems fair.
“He then opened a binder to a page that, according to Gallo-Chasanoff, had about eight questions on it. The top one was planned specifically for a college student,” she tells CNN. ” It said ‘college student’ in brackets and then the question.”
And the quesiton: “As a young person, I’m worried about the long-term effects of global warming. How does your plan combat climate change?”
Over in the Clinton camp, Hillary’s campaign spokesman Mo Elleithee says Clinton had “no idea who she was calling on”.
But she adds: “This is not acceptable campaign process moving forward. We’ve taken steps to ensure that it never happens again.”
Gallo-Chasanoff goes on: “After the event, I heard another man … talking about the question he asked, and he said that the campaign had asked him to ask that question.” he asks: “I wonder what you propose to do to create jobs for the middle-class person, such as here in Newton where we lost Maytag.” (A factory making Maytag white goods in Newton closed in the area.),
During the course of the late-night interview on Grinnell’s campus, Gallo-Chasanoff also told CNN that the day before the school’s newspaper, Scarlet and Black, printed the story, she wanted the reporter to inform the campaign out of courtesy to let them know it would be published.
She said the “head of publicity for the campaign,” a man whose name she could not recall, had no factual disputes with the story. But, she added, a Clinton intern spoke to her to say the campaign requests she “not talk about” the story to any more media outlets and that if she did she should inform a staffer…
Gallo-Chasanoff’s story comes at a time when a second person has also come forward with a similar one. Geoffrey Mitchell of Hamilton, Illinois, a town located on the Iowa border, told CNN the Clinton campaign also wanted him to ask a certain question at an Iowa event in April.
“He asked me if I would ask Sen. Clinton about ways she was going to confront the president on the war in Iraq, specifically war funding,” said Geoffrey Mitchell, a supporter of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois. “I told him it was not a question I felt comfortable with.”
Hillary has plenty of time to lose this. But do we really care that a question is planted? Our politicans are so removed from the people they represent the fact they bother to even pretend to listen to us is the shocker…
Posted: 13th, November 2007 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
