With the "Internets" comment made by President Bush during the second presidential debate, questions have arisen whether three presidential candidates personally answered questions in an online debate.
Anthony Tedesco, founder of the presidential youth debates, said the campaigns insisted their candidates were personally involved.
"They recognize us as a potential swing vote," Tedesco wrote in an e-mail. "They know how poorly it would reflect on them if millions of young Americans felt they didn't care enough to personally address them."
The three presidential candidates who participated in the online debate posted rebuttals Wednesday.
Bush, Sen. John Kerry and independent candidate Ralph Nader responded to 12 questions posted for the debate last week.
Kerry said he wanted to respond to areas Bush has failed in, health care in particular.
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"George Bush has had four years to do something - anything - about our nation's health-care problem," he said. "He's done nothing, and now he is asking for another four years to make the same wrong choices for America."
Kerry said the Bush administration's health care reform proposals, such as the Associated Health Plan and expansion of the Health Savings Accounts, would make health care more costly for the average American.
"My plan will provide relief for small businesses who provide workers' health care," he said.
Bush responded by saying he has a comprehensive approach to health care that would significantly cut costs through the use of health information technologies to give people more affordable choices and to provide better control over health-care options.
He said Kerry has a plan to create the greatest government expansion of health care in history.
"I intend to leave health care decisions to patients and their doctors, not the government," he said.
Kerry said Bush made the wrong choices in fighting terrorism. He said the president used the invasion of Iraq as a diversion from hunting those responsible for the Sept.11 attacks.
"Instead of using U.S. forces to capture Osama bin Laden, the president outsourced the job to Afghan warlords who let bin Laden slip away," he said.
Bush disagreed with Kerry and said his administration has led to the successful capture of 75 percent of al Qaeda's leadership. He used the election in Afghanistan as an example of his success in the region.
"Significantly, the first person to cast a ballot was a 19-year-old woman," he said. "This is tremendous progress."
Ralph Nader didn't address specific issues in his rebuttal, but attacked Bush and Kerry for not giving people straightforward answers.
"One candidate in the first sentence of his opening statement failed the basic test of subject-verb agreement," he said. "The other panders to stereotypes of youth with short, simplistic answers that don't answer the questions of how."
Nader said the future of America lies in the hands of the young voter, but Democrats and Republicans haven't been successful in incorporating youth into their agendas.
He said of the 13 million students in America who attend college, only 350,000 of them actively participate in partisan clubs on campus.
"Less than 5 percent of college students think enough of either party to volunteer for them," he said. "Those are hardly inspiring numbers."
