Substance, debates, synergy and Syzygy™

In retrospect the impact of the McCain campaign’s raising questions about Gwen Ifill’s impartiality as a moderator for the Vice Presidential debates was to limit her tendency to do anything that might be construed as pushing Governor Palin around – such as the follow-up questions that made the Katie Couric interview so revealing.  Nobody thought that the relative novice would hold up as well as Dick Cheney had when Ms. Ifill hosted the analogous event four years previously, and if the Governor could stick to her talking points as President Bush has done so adamantly over the years there was hope that she might not embarrass herself and the GOP.

With so much at stake the voters – and indeed the world – deserves to learn more about where the candidates for President stand in their planning process than Ms. Ifill was able to elicit from the Governor that evening.  Tom Brokaw frankly fared little better a week later when he essentially ceded control of the “town hall” debate to Senators Obama and McCain.  I sympathize; no news organization wants to offend the powerful, and one of those two is surely about to ascend to the White House.  Yet I wanted, and dared hope for, more that night.

What we learned was important.  From McCain’s dismissive assessment of the likelihood the first questioner was informed enough to know about Fannie Mae to his pejorative “that one” attack on Obama, and from Obama’s own unwillingness to let attacks and misinformation stand when the pre-arranged rules the parties had agreed to adopt meant the topic was theoretically done because the moderator was ready to move on, we learned about the men’s character – about how their leadership style.  I care about the approach a leader has, his or her willingness to listen, to build coalitions, and what it takes to get them to change their plan(s). In that sense Brokaw’s night did offer us insight.

Yet I’d have learned much the same things watching the two play Bridge, Spades, or even Syzygy™ among other possibilities, and probably learned considerably more about their actual thinking in the process. We’d have seen them interacting under circumstances more of us are familiar with. If they get to talk about whatever they choose and say whatever they want to, let’s turn them loose in a less-contrived format so we can, in fact, see the real person in action.

Calling such exercises “debates” is a polite fiction at best when the moderators allow participants to make any statements at all without interceding to correct factual data. We expect politicians to spin an opponent’s voting record, but voters frankly deserve to know the other side of the story without it detracting from a candidate’s allotted time – that’s the function we’ve been missing in these much ballyhooed performances. It a time when so much is at stake, letting misstatements and innuendos about tax policy, reforming health care, jobs, foreign policy, energy and the environment, etc., stand unchallenged in a national forum just because they fall short of being outright slanderous smears approaches malfeasance of a moderator’s duty.

If we expect the candidates to do their job informing us of their plans for Afghanistan and Iraq, or the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the resulting bailout amid revelations about the impact of deregulating Wall Street on the earnings of those on Main Street, the moderators must do theirs as well. That is the trust they are given when selected:  to insure voters and other viewers see more than a choreographed recitation of talking points which have already been repeated nearly countless times for the record.

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