There have now been two rounds of Democratic presidential debates. That’s a total of 12 hours of my life that I’ll never get back.
And for what? None of it seemed to have much effect. The frontrunners before the debates are still the front-runners now. Nobody from the polling netherworlds broke through exactly, though some may have gotten a little traction. To the extent that the liberal candidates were obliged or eager to nail down party activists they probably got exposure for positions that will hurt them if any survive to the general election. Polling indicates that voters like their private health insurance and don’t want to decriminalize border crossings.
Joe Biden got scuffed up, but nobody landed a knockout punch. If his support was a mile wide and an inch deep before the debates it’s probably a mile wide and a half-inch deep now.
But the more interesting question is why we do this at all. What is it about a good or bad debate performance that should indicate that a candidate would be a good or bad president?
Debates, in their current format, reward aggressiveness, strong statements without a hint of nuance, and cheap shots. Is that what we want in a president? Isn’t that what we already have in a president?
It’s simply impossible to fully develop an argument in a minute, much less in 30 seconds and to make matters worse, candidates are advised to show “energy” on camera. Words are rapid-fired sometimes right at an opponent and more often just randomly into the air. What we get is neither carefully prepared presentations nor meaningful conversations, but blasts of prepackaged sound bites often delivered whenever they can be forced in and regardless of the topic at hand.
As a result, calmness, thoughtfulness, wisdom and wit are not rewarded even if they get a chance to be displayed at all.
Now, you might point out that an American president who had all four of those qualities in large supply made his name in debates. In 1858 Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held seven three-hour debates around the state of Illinois. Lincoln ultimately lost the election for United States Senate, but he was so eloquent in the debates, which centered on slavery, that it helped propel him to the White House two years later.
But while these were called debates, they bore no resemblance to the verbal riots of the modern debate format. In each debate either Douglas or Lincoln would open with an hour-long address. The other would then speak for 90 minutes. The first then had 30 minutes of rebuttal. So each debate was basically just three long speeches in which the candidates could fully develop their ideas without interruption.
Things sped up by a lot a century later when John Kennedy and Richard Nixon met in the first-ever televised debates. But even then each candidate had a luxurious eight minutes to make his opening statement and three minutes to wrap things up at the end. Like Lincoln it is often argued that JFK’s debate performances propelled him into the White House, but the format gave Kennedy enough room to complete a thought and to demonstrate his wit and vision. The Kennedy-Nixon debates were different animals than today’s rapid-fire affairs.
It seems to me that the folly of the current format is best illustrated in two candidates. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is smart, thoughtful and self-possessed. To me at least he comes off as presidential. But pundits and polls suggest that he hasn’t done well in these debates, though he is generally thought to have done much better in the second round. Buttigieg just has a personality and demeanor that doesn’t lend itself to a verbal brawl. Far from being a disqualification for high public office, that strikes me as a recommendation for it.
On the other end of the spectrum is self-help author Marianne Williamson, who is by background the least qualified person among the two-dozen Democrats to be president. And yet there are a fair number of commentators who believe she won the second debate. Like Donald Trump, she’s never held public office, but she’s been on television a lot. She’s not malicious like Trump but she shares his complete lack of preparation for the job she’s seeking. And, yet, in the reality TV world of these debates, she shines in the eyes of part of the audience.
Look, as a general rule, I always think that more information is better. So seeing all these candidates in action adds to what we know about them and, I suppose, on balance it might be better than not seeing them at all. But our current political vetting system has given us Trump and it has elevated Williamson while a candidate like Buttigieg struggles. I don’t see the crucible of what amounts to verbal Twitter storms ever producing another Abraham Lincoln. The value of these debates is debatable.
