The global warming question: was it worth it?

The story of Hillary Clinton's campaign planting questions with audience members at campaign stops seems mostly noteworthy to me because of the inferences that can be drawn from it-- ranging from the analytical (it will damage voters' perceptions of her) to the more far-flung psychological (I've heard people speak of the "arrogance" of the Clinton campaign).

Certainly, I don't ever want to see politicians pronouncing authenticity where it doesn't exist; but as an isolated incident, having a college student ask a question about global warming isn't going to do much harm. It is not as serious as deceptively ducking from responsibility, like FEMA did with a fake news conference about the California wildfires, and it doesn't even compare-- in terms of scope and enormity of issues addressed-- to the fake news packages produced under the Bush administration.

Because the real story lies in the incident's implications, it is interesting to watch the media's reaction. The New York Times writes a pretty straight account of the incident and mentions toward the end of the article a second alleged time the Clinton campaign tried to plant a question at an Iowa event. The article ends with the Clinton campaign disputing that second story.

FOX News, which first broke the planting story nationally after Grinnell's Scarlet and Black wrote about it, approached the second allegation more aggressively, making the second incident sound more legitimate and the Clinton campaign more deceptive. They also ran this analytical story about the negative impact it could have on her campaign; "rarely has there been as packaged and protected a presidential candidate as Hillary Clinton," they quote Larry Sabato, from the University of Virginia, as saying.

LA Times blogger Andrew Malcolm downplays the event, pointing out that "virtually every professional presidential campaign plants questions."

The Des Moines Register's lede today in a story giving John Edwards' response to the affair really packs a punch, which I think is great: "Hillary Clinton's campaign was acting like President Bush's when it recently planted a softball question."

There are certainly a lot of ways to read into this story, including arguing that it's not really a story at all... which makes me wonder why it even happened in the first place. Why would the campaign run the risk of creating such a fuss when the payoff was just three more minutes or so to talk about global warming?