"No more debates? No. More debates."

[babylonsister]

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/02/13/120213taco_talk_hertzberg

The Debate Debate
by Hendrik Hertzberg
February 13, 2012


“We’ve got to stop the debates! Enough with the debates!” That was John McCain’s plea on “Meet the Press” the Sunday before his favored candidate (Mitt Romney) pulped his unfavored one (Newt Gingrich) like an overripe orange in the Florida Republican primary.

snip//


There’s a lot about the debates that’s problematic. They privilege certain abilities—eloquence, aggressiveness, quickness of wit, an ability to convey emotions that “resonate”—that are not always distinguishable from glibness or demagoguery. Nor are today’s debates all that distinguishable from other kinds of “reality” television—the elaborate red-white-and-blue sets, the swooping cameras, the “new media” flourishes (questions from Twitter and YouTube), the howling studio audiences. The accepted format, somewhere between a joint press conference and an unfriendly, overcaffeinated panel discussion, is choppy and awkward. Even so, especially against the background of the increasing ghastliness of other aspects of twenty-first-century campaigning, the debates are of inestimable value. They enable voters to see and hear the candidates in a sustained manner, outside the protective cocoons of their handlers, packagers, stage managers, consultants, PACs, and Super PACs. They oblige the candidates to speak for themselves. As Minow has written, “The debates are the only time during presidential campaigns when the major candidates appear together side by side under conditions that they do not control.” In TiVo veritas.

This year, the Commission on Presidential Debates, which Minow organized, co-chaired, and, at the age of eighty-six, still serves as a board member, has scheduled three debates in October between President Obama and his eventual opponent. But, if it takes a party twenty-odd debates to pick a candidate, are three enough for a country to pick a President? That other Newt, Gingrich, keeps saying, with his customary grandiosity, that he wants to debate Obama seven times, Lincoln-Douglas style, without a moderator. Newt may be going nowhere, and he’s no Douglas (never mind Lincoln), but is his number really so far off? Before J.F.K. was assassinated, he and Barry Goldwater talked about stumping the country together as a debating duo, even sharing the same plane. Wouldn’t it be a canny move, as well as a daring and imaginative one, for the current President to propose something similar this fall, to—well, to Mitt Romney, presumably? If Romney declined, no harm done, except maybe to him. If he said yes, the public interest would be well served (and the partnership would make it a little harder for either side to conduct a parallel campaign of Super PAC slanders). No more debates? No. More debates. ?

[tanyev]

1. "No more debates on my lawn!"