I really wanted to read and enjoy the New York Times' smart idea of asking five experts what questions hadn't yet been put to the Democratic candidates in advance of tonight's (what may be final) debate, in Ohio.

Unfortunately, their questions weren't that good.

Charlie Savage's first batch were actually okay, though I think it's a little bit of a lazy approximation to imply that because the White House "won court rulings upholding the indefinite detention of two Americans as enemy combatants," such a policy had been ratified by a court. The only court that matters never got a chance to fully rule on the indefinite detention of Jose Padilla; the Bush White House, smelling defeat in the court it had carefully stacked in its favor, transferred Padilla to the civilian legal system and tried him on new, previously unheard-of charges, all to avoid a Supreme Court determination on whether it could indefinitely hold a citizen without due process of law. Some lower courts had given the White House wins in this area, true, but our system isn't like a game show. The White House can't just take its winnings and go home.

Further down, questioners seem ill-informed, or just sort of phoning it in. Roger Lowenstein's NAFTA question is about 24 hours behind the Obama-NAFTA news cycle (and I think it's safe to say the candidates will get NAFTA questions tonight). I can think of exactly no learning gathered from full answers to Christine Rosen's questions about BlackBerrys and the impact of the "unruly mob" Internet on daily life.

I like Atul Gawande's question about health care, but it's clear he's being willfully naive. He knows exactly what the challenges are to implementing a non-single-payer health care system such as the ones advocated by both Senators Clinton and Obama. The truth is, these plans will be starting points for a lot of negotiation that will yield something less than is promised. No surprises here.

Meanwhile, the only truly foreign policy questions are a bunch of right-wing talking points. I scrolled to the bottom expecting to read BIll Kristol's smirking name, but found a useful surrogate, onetime Guiliani campaign adviser Ruth Wedgwood. Wedgwood's questions run the gamut from the blindly hyperpatriotic (do you still think it was a waste of Senate time to debate and vote on a resolution condemning Moveon.org?) to the revisionist (didn't we go to war to end Saddam Hussein's decades-old genocides which had ended a long time ago?).

A far better selection of un-asked questions can be found in a related piece, an anthology of suggested queries culled from NYTimes.com commenters. The smart, succinct questions cover a wide variety of topics better than the media-dulled batch from the newer piece. Commenters ask about nuclear weapons policy, noting a difference in the stances of Clinton and Obama, as well as a carbon tax, the potential of a long term agreement with Iraq about a future security arrangement being subject to Senate ratification like any other treaty, even changing findings about the "clean-ness" of ethanol and who might serve as their top advisers.

Good thinking.

Photo courtesy Flickr user silent (e).