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People will be talking about the presidential debates for the rest of this month, but there's one issue that is unlikely to emerge: What good are they?
The alleged model for our modern presidential debates goes back to the Illinois senate election of 1858, when incumbent Democrat Stephen A. Douglas was challenged by an obscure one-term congressman, Abraham Lincoln.
Douglas, who was much better known then than Lincoln, had little to gain from the debates, but to his credit, he accepted Lincoln's challenge. Their debates were three hours long, and they met seven times that fall, once in each congressional district in Illinois.
With that much time, and that many encounters, they said some memorable things, and Lincoln maneuvered Douglas into statements which helped him win in Illinois that year, but cost him support in the South when he ran for president in 1860 against Lincoln -- who wasn't even on the ballot in most of the South.
Those debates might be a worthy model, but the modern
debates fall far short. Lincoln and Douglas each got an
hour to state his case, and another half-hour for rebuttal.
Modern candidates get two minutes, which rewards clever
one-liners like There you go again,
rather than
sustained logical argument.
And that's just a start on what's wrong with our
debating system. Indeed, it's a travesty to call these
events debates.
When I took a debating class in high
school many years ago, we learned that a debate has a
formal proposition, like America's oppressed
billionaires should receive further tax relief.
One
side argues the affirmative and the other the negative.
What we have now is more like a joint press conference with
each candidate taking a turn at the same question.
In theory, a debate might tell us something about how quickly and well the candidates think. But in practice, they've been coached so that there's a polished response to every conceivable question. The whole thing is about as spontaneous as a ballet recital, and if everything goes according to plan, then everything we see is scripted.
And what if the script fails, as with Gerald Ford in 1976, when he claimed that Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination? He lost the election, but I suspect that resulted from Watergate and his pardon of Richard Nixon, not because of this gaffe.
The debates also put a premium on appearances. Go back to the first modern presidential debate, between Sen. John F. Kennedy and Vice-President Richard M. Nixon. Nixon had been ill and looked terrible under the TV lights; Kennedy was tanned and looked healthy (even though he wasn't).
People who listened on the radio thought that Nixon had cleaned Kennedy's clock, while those who watched TV believed Kennedy had out-argued Nixon.
So who was right about the winner?
This brings up another problem with the modern presidential debates. The entire discussion afterward is not about relevant issues, like whether invading and occupying Iraq was the best way to respond to a terrorist attack mostly perpetrated by Saudi citizens, or whether converting a federal surplus into an immense deficit is sound fiscal policy.
Instead, the discussion will be about who lost
and who won.
The alleged winner is usually the
candidate who stayed on message
(which generally
involves answering a question that was not asked, but
cleverly blurring this deliberate obfuscation) and who
projected calm confidence
while conveying a
strong grasp of the issues.
The loser will be the one who gets rattled
or
goes off message,
or who might find it impossible to
address a complex issue, like Social Security and the Baby
Boomers, in 120 seconds.
Further, the anointing of a winner and loser doesn't tell us anything about who'd be the better president. They don't even tell us who's the better debater, since they're not even real debates.
But they do serve one purpose. On live TV, the candidates demonstrate their inability to be candid, and thus we need not be shocked or horrified when one lies to us after the election, too.
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