It seems like I just came back from Yearly Kos (oh that's right, I did, and I'm really tired), but I'm off on a loooong flight this AM to L.A. today to liveblog the The Visible Vote '08: A Presidential Forum, pulled together by HRC and LOGO. It's been made clear that this is not billed as a debate, but a conversation with the Democratic candidates on LGBT issues -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel (because of scheduling conflicts, Dodd and Biden will not be present).
In this format, for better or worse, each candidate will appear solo, on the stage for 15 minutes taking questions from Human Rights Campaign's Joe Solmonese and singer Melissa Etheridge, as well as journalists Margaret Carlson and Jonathan Capehart, and over 4,000 questions were submitted at VisibleVote08.com.
The forum airs at 9PM ET on LOGO with the live webcast at The Visible Vote '08. There will be a studio audience there, but the set up will be the same as it was for the PBS debate -- bloggers and the rest of the media will be off in a different, nearby building, and I was told by MTV/LOGO that none of the candidates will appear afterward in the spin room.
The candidates responded to HRC's questionnaire on LGBT rights, so you have a general idea of their positions. Answers were released in June in a grid format without candidate comments). The full responses from Clinton, Obama, Biden, Dodd, Kucinich and Richardson and Gravel were made available later, after the Edwards camp released his full answers to the questionnaire to me, (I posted them and blogged about it here).
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