Anthony Tedesco

If you are under 30, send us your question about whatever you want to know from Bush and Gore. We’ll forward it to the two candidates, both of whom have promised to respond. In 1996, both President Clinton and Sen. Robert Dole coughed up some answers for the 1996 Online Presidential Youth Debate.

As in the 1996 effort, Farai Chideya, syndicated columnist and editor of online political journal Pop & Politics, and writer Deroy Murdock, who sits on the board of Gen X think thank Third Millennium, have each submitted a question to get the ball rolling. The rest of the debate is up to you.

Chideya: In the decades since Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court has ruled that districts cannot be forced to use means such as busing and magnet schools to enforce desegregation orders. Today, the majority of black children attend majority-black schools, and many other children go to schools where racial integration is still a dream. If you still believe in that dream, what will you do — with laws and concrete actions — to make educational integration a reality?

Murdock: Amid all the talk about “working families” and “leaving no child behind,” both of you have said virtually nothing to the 46.6 million single American adults. Please explain why you have treated this massive voting bloc with such neglect, and how your tax cut proposals will benefit the millions of hardworking single adults who lack mortgages or children to place in day care or college.

Mail your question to questions@salon.com.

So I vote. Though, I’m embarrassed to say, almost solely in presidential elections. I just never want to cast an uninformed vote, and it takes every scintilla — every physical and spiritual calorie within my body — to weed through all the mudslinging and willy-nilly wheedling that politicians do, and perhaps need to do, to get elected. I require four years of political convalescence. That impetus just barely nudged me into the ballot booth for the first two presidential elections I was old enough to vote in: 1988 and 1992.

In 1996, however, I just wasn’t feeling the urgency. So three weeks before the presidential election, I picked up the phone, called President Clinton and Bob Dole, and asked them to answer 10 questions from young voters nationwide in the 1996 Online Presidential Youth Debate. Surprisingly, they agreed. Two generous and inspiring young political advocates, Farai Chideya and Deroy Murdock, offered to co-moderate the event. The candidates responded. I got my nudge and voted. I assumed this was the dawn of the new, politically active me.

Nope. Less than a month before the 2000 presidential election, I found myself once again floundering for inspiration to vote — as I’m sure other voters around 30 or younger who didn’t find the candidates’ choice topics, including drug prescription benefits and Social Security privatization, that urgent. So I went to the candidates again. While Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan declined, George W. Bush and Al Gore accepted. And I pooled — with the contributions of Farai and Deroy — more questions from Salon’s younger readers.

Forgive me a political rah-rah for a moment, but I do hope this debate will help mobilize young voters, or at the very least give voters a chance to compare and contrast the responses to these questions from our candidates. They were willing to respond to the questions. Now you can at least decide whether you like the answers.