To someone, it must have seemed like such a good idea.
Find a stage, find some microphones, find some candidates.
Throw in a feisty moderator or two. Get them to ask the candidates provocative questions like: Who's more conservative? Did you or have you ever seen a UFO? And who do you think for Hillary's alter-ego: Rocky or Apollo Creed?
The point is to get the candidates to answer as many possible questions in the shortest possible time. Forget the issues—it's all about the he-said, she-said. Get the candidates riled and get them flustered. Then, with any luck at all, you'll have the entire audience — and the viewers back at home — up on their feet and screaming Cockney as good as Eliza Doolittle ever did.
"Come on, Romney! Come on, Biden! Move yur bloomin…."
Such is the state of the 2008 presidential debates thus far: Fodder for horse race commentary. Think American Idol. Think Dancing with the Stars. Think anything but reasoned, thoughtful discussion of the issues. For all the debates have taught us about how the various candidates campaign, they have largely failed to articulate or differentiate between the policies, plans, and ideologies they purport. In style, the debates promote a robotic sequence of well-tailored speeches ripe for sound bite plucking. They put on an impressive display of flashy grins, petty jabs, and political sidestepping. Above all else, the debates encourage that brand of political discussion that condenses breathtakingly complex topics (like, say, a nuclear Iran) into 90-second nicely parceled packages.
Like I said, it must have seemed like such a good idea, to someone.
First and foremost, the problem with debates is that they make the Presidential Election less about highlighting the best candidate and more about highlighting the best campaigner. In the epoch of televised talent shows, Americans flip on their televisions and can watch Edwards as Underwood and Russert and Cowell.
The surest way to end the negative outcroppings of the campaign season — the media's horserace commentary, the debate's reality talent-show like format, the public's frustration that it knows too little about the candidates' position on issues — would be to revolutionize how we in America conduct our Presidential debates.
Revolution begins with the simplest of changes. We need to introduce one-topic debates.
These debates would take on, one at a time, the issues that directly affect the United States today:
Funding the Iraq War; Health Care; Income Inequality. Imagine a debate on the Iraq War that went beyond the tired discussion of "for" or "against," of all-in surge or irrevocable withdrawal.
Imagine a conversation about health care that dug deeper than the usual party-line rhetoric that equates socialized medicine to government takeover or that accuses the Big Bad Conservative as the only thing that stands between a suffering child and his miracle drug.
How about a debate on immigration not limited to the discussion of fences? Or one about the economy not tied down beginning, middle, and end with the words "I will not raise taxes…"
In these debates, the focus of contention would be the policy, not the politician.
In debates these days, a voter is hard-pressed to find a Republican who doesn't think American history began and ended with the Reagan administration or locate a Democrat cognizant of any administration pre-Bush Jr. Single-topic debates would call on politicians to throw out the scripts and rulebooks their parties wrote and focus on the reality of the world around them.
After all, presidential debates are not the time or place for candidates to wax poetic about the tired topics of what it means to be a liberal, a conservative, or to have "values." Leave that for the campaign ads. These are times to understand how our leaders process ideas, think about current events and interpret history.
With a world erupting in conflict around us, the conflict between senators Obama and Clinton shouldn't be the issue that matters most.
Reach the reporter at: rservis@asu.edu.
