It wasn't exactly the Frost/Nixon interview, but it was entertaining enough. ABC News Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos interviewed Sen. John McCain for 15 minutes on Twitter today, an exchange that covered 10 questions on the AIG bailout, Iran and Iraq, and McCain's daughter Meghan's feud with Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham.@GStephanopoulis, who has 175,000 followers, and @SenJohnMcCain, with 224,885, invited the public to follow the interview in advance. The interview went about two dozen tweets.

I went into it thinking it would be an empty publicity stunt. How much depth could you actually have in a 15-minute Twitter exchange? The 1977 Frost-Nixon interviews aired for four, 90-minute programs, culled from 24 hours of interviews. The Stephanopoulis-McCain interviews, on the other hand, would last for less than the amount of time of an average TV sitcom, with questions and answers limited to 140 characters.

Still, they managed to get some points across, and even have some back-and-forth:

On the AIG bailout:

GStephanopoulos: @SenJohnMcCain AIG: Would a President McCain break bonus contracts? Obama teams says that would cause more harm than good
SenJohnMcCain: @GStephanopoulos i would have never bailed out AIG, the real scandal is billions to foreign banks.
GStephanopoulos: @SenJohnMcCain ok, but today: should bonus contracts be broken? Dodd wants a targeted tax on bonuses OK with that?
SenJohnMcCain: @GStephanopoulos i haven't seen it but i would explore every option. i repeat, we wouldn't have this problem if we hadn't bailed them out
GStephanopoulos: @SenJohnMcCain RIght, but didn't you vote for first TARP, which went to AIG?

I re-tweeted that last message from Stephanopoulos, with the comment, "Oh, snap!" But I snapped too soon, because Sen. McCain had a response:

SenJohnMcCain: i voted for first tarp but that doesn't mean i voted to bail out AIG.
SenJohnMcCain: @GStephanopoulos to follow up - first AIG bailout was pre-tarp.

On foreign policy:

GStephanopoulos: @SenJohnMcCain What worries you more: Pakistan or Iran?
SenJohnMcCain: @GStephanopoulos both. the challenges are different but both significant.
...
GStephanopoulos: @SenJohMcCain Cheney said on CNN that Obama putting US at risk of new terror attack Agree?
SenJohnMcCain: @GStephanopoulos too early to draw that conclusion.

On the family feud between McCain's daughter Meghan and conservative commentators Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham:

GStephanopoulos: @SenJohnMcCain Lots of twitterers want to know: what do you think of Meghans's feud with Coulter and Ingraham?
SenJohnMcCain: @GStephanopoulos I'm proud of my daughter and she has a right to her opinions.
SenJohnMcCain: @GStephanopoulos like any family we agree on some things and disagree on others.

The exchange illustrates a drawback of Twitter as an interview medium: It's unsuited for nuanced discussion and doesn't permit a journalist to press an interview subject who's being evasive. McCain doesn't actually answer Stephanopoulis's questions about AIG and Iran and Pakistan. He doesn't even take his own daughter's side in an argument. McCain has clearly learned from Charles Durning's performance in the movie The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas:

(Reporter: "What do you think of the crisis in the Middle East?" GOVERNOR: "I was saying just this morning at the weekly prayer breakfast in this historic capital that it behooves both the Jews and the Ay-rabs to settle their differences in a Christian manner.")

On the other hand, Twitter, does, surprisingly, have advantages as a forum for political discussion. It's convenient. The same ease-of-use and ubiquity that lets you post complaints about your airline being late also allows you to skim a political discussion while doing other things. In my case, I kept one eye on the Stephanopoulos-McCain exchange while also proofreading the InformationWeek Blog Newsletter.

And the novelty value of holding a debate on Twitter -- let's face it, it's a publicity gimmick -- can draw attention to political movements that are having difficulty getting attention through conventional channels. Like, for example, the Republican Party.

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