Can't believe I forgot to post this here last week.

Starting 9 months ago my company, BlogHer, worked with our community of thousands of (mostly) women bloggers to develop a series of non-partisan, policy questions that wanted every presidential candidate to answer if they wanted to earn our votes. We called it the BlogHer Voter Manifesto.

And for 6 months, none of them bit.

We were offering to give them the questions in advance, hell they're public on our web site. We were offering to send a BlogHer rep from their own side of the aisle to do the interview and ask the questions. We were offering to show up wherever and whenever the candidates preferred.

Not a bite.

Some of them offered spouses. Or asked us to promote their online site sections for women. We got a little discouraged, but we asked our community...well, would that be enough. Should we stop there. The community overwhelmingly said "wouldn't mind hearing from spouses, but we definitely do NOT want you to stop badgering the candidates to answer our questions."

So, we didn't. we kept reminding the ever-dwindling number of candidates that our community now reaches over 9 million unique visitors a month. That's a lot. By anyone's measure.

Finally, and amazingly, the Obama campaign agreed, and one week ago today we posted the video of that one-on-one video of a BlogHer political editor interviewing Obama in Roseburg, Oregon.

You can also check it out directly here:



Power to the people! It was bloggers of every ideological stripe, and most of them NOT political bloggers and political junkies, who helped shape these questions.

Some have said the questions are too simple, not visionary enough. But I think it's a pretty clear indication that regular people just want to know what the candidates are going to DO about what they say they believe in,

We hope McCain and Clinton will soon follow.

In the meantime we also did get an exclusive audio itnerview with McCain campaign chair (and former HP CEO) Carly Fiorina, which you can listen to here.