The main point that I want to make is this. When elected officials speak to groups of people, those groups of people are generally checked out--That is why many meet and greets and speeches have tickets. You might not have been able to ask the president a question if you weren’t a republican. Maybe you could have. Every camp is different, but every staff wants their candidate to look their best, and bad questions and even worse answers are a fast way to stall (or end) any campaign. You try to avoid that at all costs. Just look at some of the biggest campaign screw ups- a lot of them were caused by a question the candidate could not or would not answer.
Comparing screening attendants to planting questions are 2 entirely different things. What I went to was a pep-rally as are most of the events. Of course you want campaign workers there, that is completely different than handing a person a question and asking them to pretend it is theirs. It doesn’t appear that is what you were doing which is exaclty what Harpy was doing.
Pray for W and Our Victorious Troops
Are you talking about debates, or just routine campaign stops? Also, this is a case where a supposedly objective media outlet, which was responsible for the conduct of the debates, was co-opted to do the dirty work for just one of the participants. Seems to me that's quite different from what you're talking about.