WANT GREAT 2016 PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES? KICK THE PRESS OFF THE PODIUM
You might think that it’s too early to be thinking about the 2016 presidential debates, but it’s not. Even today, it’s easy to tell that next year’s presidential debates are going to be very important to the outcome. The election will be close, and will be fought mostly in a small number of swing states. Therefore, the best way for most voters nationwide to find out if their preferred candidate matches up well against his or her opponent will be to watch presidential debates. Voters certainly think so: more than 59 million of them watched the final 2012 debate between President Obama and former Governor Mitt Romney.
This post argues that the best way to have great presidential debates in 2016 that really help voters decide is to kick press moderators off the podium. Here’s the problem: by doing their jobs, they quite effectively prevent the kind of no-holds barred debates the country actually deserves and really needs. It’s time the candidates stopped hiding behind the moderators, and let voters see how they really compare to their opponents. Here’s a historical example that shows why this is so important.
When Abraham Lincoln ran for the United States Senate in 1858, his opponent was the incumbent Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas. Douglas was a powerful national figure and a formidable debater. Yet Lincoln challenged him to a series of debates. As a result, he not only nearly won the election, he went from being an obscure Illinois state politician to being a national figure. The debates gave Lincoln a chance to challenge Douglas on his major claim to national prominence: his willingness to allow slavery to expand. But Lincoln’s ability to challenge Douglas successfully depended critically on the debates’ format. Here’s how they worked.
Lincoln and Douglas debated seven times, at different locations across the state of Illinois. “In each debate either Douglas or Lincoln would open with an hour address. The other would then speak for an hour and a half. The first then had 30 minutes of rebuttal.”[1] There were no press moderators–or moderators of any kind. All told, the two candidates spoke for ten and one-half hours each, so they had time to come back to an issue repeatedly if they wanted to, and whenever they wanted to. (The three presidential debates in 2012 lasted four and one-half hours total–or two hours and fifteen minutes per candidate (???!!!)). As a result, each candidate could and did use every political weapon he had available–from humor and sarcasm to political philosophy to history to religion, and even open appeals to voters’ prejudices such as white racism. And the other candidate got to respond to every one of those tactics, far more successfully than could have been done by other campaign techniques. The debates were also fully reported in the press. The results make remarkable reading, unlike political speeches today. The debates were thoughtful and often moving. The candidates got to the heart of the issues.[2]
Lincoln spent much of his time in the debates trying to force Douglas to take a clear position about his views on the spread of slavery. He finally succeeded in compelling Douglas to take a specific stand, something Douglas had tried hard to avoid because doing so would cost him votes. No one who watched or read the Lincoln-Douglas debates could have been left in doubt about where each candidate stood on issues that mattered, especially slavery. Isn’t it obvious that the open Lincoln-Douglas format is a far better way of conducting political debates and forming our government’s future agenda than the press moderator method used in presidential debates today?
But if that’s so, why do presidential campaigns continue to agree to use the press-moderator format?[3] Because both the press and the campaigns get something out of it. The press gets exposure and legitimacy for its role as a “neutral arbiter” of the debates. Even more important, though, the format protects the candidates by letting them perform with scripts. It protects them from unanticipated attacks (press questions rarely surprise anyone), from factual errors or downright ignorance, from appearing to have run out of ideas because they have to talk about an issue for more than five minutes, or from having the nation see that they are unable to respond to an opponent’s really good argument. And it often protects them from being subjected to a really effective response if there is one.
In short, today the candidates get to stick to their scripts because they never really end up confronting each other in an extended dialogue. After the debates, they can go back to giving speeches just to supporters. After all, if a candidate thinks a presidential election is not about changing voters’ minds, but just about getting enough of his or her supporters to the polls, preaching to a choir of supporters is all that’s needed. Debates just get in the way of that critical mission–so such a candidate just wants the debates over without having cost him or her votes.
Ironically, the existing moderator format means debates now are just the opposite of the realities of political life and negotiation–which constitutes a series of often unplanned confrontations in an extended public and private dialogue. If you’ve ever voted for a presidential candidate and been disappointed with your candidate’s actual performance once in office, the existing debate format surely deserves some of your thanks. So, if you’d like to know what your favorite presidential candidate is really like and really thinks before you vote in 2016, let the campaigns know you want the press off the podium. This time, let’s make the candidates actually face each other as they face the nation.
[1] http://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debates.htm (accessed 061415).
[2] Books that reprint the entire text of the debates are readily available today. One example is The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, edited by Robert W. Johannsen, Oxford University Press, 2008 (paperback).
[3] In theory, this format is arranged through a “bipartisan” Commission on Presidential Debates, but this is a meaningless formality–both campaigns and the press have to agree or nothing would happen, and the commission just provides political cover and a way of excluding “minor” candidates.
Modern Politics and Society 