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Article Excerpt
During the 2008 vice presidential debate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was pressed by her Democratic rival, Delaware Senator Joe Biden, and moderator Gwen I fill to reply to a question she had previously ignored. The chipper Palin, who thrived on the perception of being persecuted, demurred. "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear," she parried, "but I'm going to talk straight to the American people." (1)
For this statement, Palin suffered not only rebuke, but ridicule. Flaunting her intent to duck a question amounted to a failure of manners. Part of the performance of a presidential (or vice presidential) debate, after all, consists of following certain conventions. One is that candidates are supposed to act as if they are there to report to the public their ticket's positions on prominent policy issues, thereby helping voters figure out which party better matches their own preferences. According to this logic, Palin's sin lay not in her evasion of the question - a common enough occurrence in the debates - but in her unabashed admission of the evasion. If a gaffe, in the journalist Michael Kinsley's formulation, is when a politician tells the truth, Palin told the truth without even the customary inadvertence. (2)
Kinsley's axiom, quoted often during the gaffe-ridden 2008 campaign, remains in currency because it highlights the power of the unspoken and sometimes unrecognized assumptions that underpin our politics. These assumptions aren't always true or even justifiable. But the public, particularly those in the news media who shape our discourse, has a stake in maintaining them. They serve a useful purpose.
An underlying premise of the discourse about the presidential debates is that they exist to inform viewers, who watch them with open minds to learn about the candidates and decide how to vote. In other words, grandiose as it may sound, our culture assigns the debates a vital democratic role: democratic theory holds that effective self-government depends on an informed citizenry, and the debates, more than any other vehicle, are supposed to teach voters what they still need to know about the candidates in the fall of a presidential election season. Accordingly, we eagerly anticipate these contests as potential turning points for the campaigns, the only scheduled events that might by design win or lose votes for one candidate or the other overnight. Journalists invariably speak of them as a rare chance for those all-important undecided voters to make up their endlessly wavering minds. In recent years networks have even convened focus groups of the vacillators on whose fleeting impressions the nation hinges, interviewing them on air after each clash to see if they were moved to reach any decisions that might collectively alter a campaign's outcome.
Of course, given the evasions, boilerplate, scripted jokes, and attention to stagecraft that routinely permeate the debates, it's hard to maintain that they fulfill this purpose of informing the independent-minded viewer. On the contrary, they seem to fail at this task often enough to earn them unremitting disparagement from the same pundits who hold them to such lofty standards. Ever since the first televised presidential contests, the 1960 "Great Debates" between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, critics have complained that the spectacles are not debates at all, but well-choreographed joint press conferences -marred, as The New York Times editorialized in 1976, by "their show-business nature; their heavy reliance on rehearsal and grooming by professional image-makers; the concern for appearance over substance." The Times noted, "The 1976 presidential debates resemble the Lincoln-Douglas debates, to which they are inevitably compared, as much as a town meeting resembles - well, a television spectacular." (3)
Nothing encapsulates the view of the debates as superficial piffle better than the inevitable - and inevitably invidious - contrasts with those legendary Illinois Senate debates. Journalists have no corner on these glib comparisons. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, the late, un-amused media critic Neil Postman railed against the Kennedy-Nixon contests as a pale imitation of Lincoln-Douglas. The Kennedy-Nixon debates, he said, marked a passage from "the Age of Exposition" to "the Age of Show Business." The hours-long, touring contests between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in the fall of 1858 exhibited "a kind of oratory that may be described as literary," with "a semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content," Postman continued, while the four Nixon-Kennedy clashes were empty charades made for television, which "speaks in only one persistent voice - the voice of entertainment." (4)
Please, Mr. Postman. Scholars should know better than to traffic in such nostalgia. The Lincoln-Douglas contests provided plenty of entertainment, too, along with double-talk, cheap shots, pandering, and no small concern with appearances. "There is much to learn from the Lincoln-Douglas debates about the politics of the 1850s," Michael Schudson has written, "but there are no lessons to 'apply' to our own time, certainly not in the form of a rebuke to a purportedly diminished political culture." (5) Differences between the two sets of debates are real, but to judge the change as only decline is to make a moral judgment, not a historical one.
In short, both the celebrations of the debates as a fount of insight into the candidates' fitness to govern and the denigrations of their lifelessness and theatricality miss the point. Both rest on flawed assumptions about what the debates are there to do. Yet if we try instead to conceive of the debates' role and purpose differently, we may perhaps appreciate the democratic function that they do perform: not the provision of vital data to blank-slate voters seeking to form a considered judgment about the candidates, but rather the stimulation and engagement of broader public interest in politics. This contribution, while more modest than the grand claims frequently made on the debates' behalf, nonetheless goes some way toward renewing voters' political commitments and enriching democracy.
The discourse about the democratic promise of the debates dates back to the Kennedy-Nixon contests. Since 1948, when Tom Dewey of New York and Harold Stassen of Minnesota squared off for an hour in pursuit of the Republican nomination, presidential primary contenders had occasionally taken to jousting over the radio. But for both political and legal reasons - mainly the fear that federal equal-time regulations would require the inclusion of all manner of fringe candidates in a prime-time free-for-all -televised general-election debates remained a dream. Only after the quiz show scandals of the late 1950s did the calculus change. With the networks' reputations suffering, a dose of high-minded public interest programming suddenly seemed like the perfect tonic. Congress suspended the...
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