Debate Prep

Your Humble Blogger is a cranky guy. Do you want to hear what I’m griping about today? Aside from the weather and stuff? Because it’s raining all day and will rain all day tomorrow. And my Best Reader will be away tonight, so I’ll have to watch the stupid debate by myself.

So here’s the thing about the debate. It’s a sham. Everybody knows that. Anybody who cares enough (and has enough time) to watch ninety minutes of information about the presidential campaign has already made up their mind who to vote for. To the extent that the debates have an effect on the still-undecided voters, it’s through the filter of news programs and talk show clips. That is, after the pundit class gets their hands on it and decides on the story of what happened.

I know it’s a sham. OK? If the candidates decided not to bother with them, I wouldn’t be particularly upset about it. It’s a sham. A sham. OK?

And yet, I think it’s a good idea, for the purposes of creating a democratic society, which is after all the point of a democracy, to pretend that it isn’t a sham. To talk about how the candidates are airing their views and explaining how their positions and priorities differ. Giving the populace a chance to see them side by side and judge between them as they argue their cases. By participating in the sham, but participating fully in it, we can hold the candidates to certain norms of behavior, and hold ourselves and our compatriots to certain norms of behavior, that are beneficial to the democracy. We can make the debates less of a sham by buying into them, but buying into them on our own terms.

Instead, what do we get? This morning’s Hartford Courant (which I am planning to cancel on Monday) has an article above the fold on Scoring Obama-McCain Debate; the print edition I read over my bagel had the subheader Panel Lists Six Factors Debate Watchers Should Consider. Katherine Q. Seelye has a piece on the Times website called What to Look For in Tonight’s Debate. These are preparations for being a pundit; if you read them carefully, you will be prepared to go on television after the debate and declare somebody a winner. You may be prepared to predict what story the actual pundits will decide on, or even pick out which clips will get play.

No. Wrong. Bad.

The newspapers do not need to train us to be amateur pundits. The newspapers should be pretending that we are participating citizens, as we should be pretending that we demand the information we need to be participating citizens. If we all pretend hard enough, it will be difficult to tell the difference between people who are just pretending, and people who are actually participating.

Here’s the article they should be printing: Tonight’s Debate: Things to Watch For Pay attention not only to what the candidates say about their policies, but which policies they choose to bring up. That’s the way to gauge the priorities of the candidates, to know what they will be willing to spend political capital on. Spend some time beforehand thinking about your preferences, not so much in policy (you don’t need a debate to compare your policy platform with the candidates’) but in worldview related to the current policy issues. Remain aware that you cannot necessarily tell if someone is sincere, but presidents who commit to supporting some stupid stuff to get elected most often wind up supporting it when they are in office, for the same political reasons, so take most of what is said on policy to be a reasonably accurate predictor of action. Try to avoid being swayed by rhetorical tricks of presentation, particularly presentation of their personas. On the other hand, their presentation of persona is also likely to remain constant, so if it’s something that will be detrimental to success in office, take it into account. Finally, try to distinguish the question that you hear the moderator ask with the question that the candidate hears; the difference will reveal differences in your fields of interest, perceptions of the universe, assumptions about the role of government.

Oh, and I’d append a list of probable topics of discussion and links to the candidates’ position papers, so that the viewer could check to see if the candidates could remember what their positions were supposed to be, and remember which one was Georgia and which one was Wachovia. But that sort of thing is asking a little much, don’t you think?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.