Republican YouTube debate rescheduled for November

The Republicans are back on board. After a few dicey weeks where it didnt look like Republican candidates wanted anything to do with video-camera wielding voters, CNN and YouTube have rescheduled their online video debate with the GOP candidates for president, the Hollywood Reporter reports.

The debate will be held November 28, postponed from an originally scheduled date of mid-September. Most of the candidates declined to participate, citing schedule conflicts.

It was tricky to triangulate everyones schedule, said David Bohrman, senior vp and Washington bureau chief at CNN.

According to the Washington Times, however, schedules had nothing to do with the case. It was conservative bloggers, coalescing around SavetheDebate.com who reversed what looked like a GOP rejection of the Internet. According to TechPresident, the Times reported:

Multiple sources close to the discussions say it was pressure from conservative bloggers, not scheduling conflicts, that made the reluctant Republican candidates reconsider. Two weeks ago, a number of prominent conservative bloggers launched an effort called Save the Debate that generated what one of the campaigns referred to as a full-court press, from conservative activists.

Still undecided: front-runner Mitt Romney, who had earlier doubted that answering a global warming question from a voter dressed as a snowman would be good for his image.

SavetheDebate is also striving to pull in questioners from outside the population of regular YouTube posters. Says TechPrez: theyre asking for Video Volunteers to head offline to county fairs, shopping malls, and local GOP events, where they can get regular non-YouTube-using folks to ask questions on video as well.