Los Angeles Times
October 9, 2004
The presidential debates — the second of which will be held tonight
— are the result of extended negotiations, enormous preparation and a
careful choreography driven by dozens of pages of rules in which no detail is
too small for negotiation.
There's only one problem, one that thousands
of competitive debaters and their coaches would recognize in an instant: Not
one of these events deserves to be called a debate.
The organizers have
appropriated the word — debate — and they have applied it to these
performances in service of an illusion. The real purpose, of course, is clear:
The candidates want to use these events to sell themselves to the public. A
debate in the true sense of the word, by contrast, would have a starkly
different purpose: to inform the public of the differences between the two
candidates, and the implications of those differences.
From 1960 to
1975, my principal activity was coaching a team of girls in debate at St.
Brendan's High School in Bro oklyn. Five times we were national champions, and
I assure you that they understood what a real debate was — an ongoing,
focused, rigorous verbal battle.
By contrast, when George W. Bush and
John F. Kerry met in Coral Gables, Fla., last week, they delivered serial stump
speeches standing side by side. They offered paragraphs extracted from familiar
monologues triggered by a key word tucked away in a question, pitched a few
well-calculated "gotcha" lines, and tried to manage their body language and
appearance.
We have lost the ability in our public discourse to speak
to one another in a way that moves ideas forward, that can result in
enlightenment — or at least reflection — and that ends in
disagreement without rancor. The presidential debates exemplify the collapse of
civil discourse, and perhaps they even accelerate its downward spiral.
Informed discussion of issues of importance is a basic premise of democracy;
these days, when the issues are so complex and so co nsequential, its absence is
keenly felt. It is puzzling to me that we have allowed this to happen.
Candidates Bush and Kerry even shared the same debate teacher at Yale. But,
somewhere between competitive debate and candidacy, some force reshaped and
debased the mode of discourse.
In a real debate, the debaters take a
position, offer a set of reasons, listen carefully to their opponent's critique
of those reasons and then offer a defense, attempting to blunt the critique.
What we got last week — and what we can expect again tonight, I'm
afraid — was something quite different. Several times in Florida the
president asserted, mantra-like, that Kerry's criticisms of his handling of the
war undermined our troops and the effort against terrorism; but the president
was never pushed to explain how. Similarly, Kerry's assertion that his
positions on the war were consistent and tied to evolving events was left
unexplained and untested.
It is particularly regrettable that these ev
ents are taking place at universities. Universities are, because of their
nature, among the last institutions in American society where a commitment to
rigorous discourse is retained. They are modern sanctuaries for dialogue
— free, unbridled and unconstrained discourse in which claims are
examined, confirmed, deepened or replaced. Had last week's encounter been a
real debate, a university would have been the ideal setting; as it is, it is
ironic that a respected university like Miami is reduced (through no fault of
its own, I might add) to providing auditorium space.
It is time for a
change. We should make federal campaign funds available only if candidates
participate in a true debate. The ground rules should be determined by a
neutral commission, so that we don't end up with side-by-side news conferences.
If a candidate refuses to debate, it should trigger additional funding for his
or her opponent and free television airtime. Moreover, the rules of the debate
must be changed to make it more competitive and less staged. There should be
extended rounds of exploration for each question, and the candidates should have
the right to cross-examine one another.
As viewers, and as citizens, we
have a right to expect the debates to do more than provide a platform for
simple, sound-bite-driven, focus-group-derived positions and a few lame jokes.
We have a right to expect a format that illuminates each candidate's positions
and offers an opportunity to examine the wisdom of those positions, that lets us
see whether those positions can withstand the scrutiny of his opponent, and that
demonstrates whether each presidential aspirant can extend a defense of his
position with precision and depth.