Let Them Fight!
We need to blow up the traditional presidential-debate formats — not because there was too much mayhem in last night’s contest, but because the mayhem wasn’t constructive enough.
The Commission on Presidential Debates is now apparently considering allowing moderators to cut candidates’ mics mid-debate. As with most issues pertaining to the debates, the Commission has it backward: We don’t need more rules, we need more open-ended discussion.
I’m positive a Joe Rogan–moderated debate would have been more enlightening than the spectacle we were subjected to yesterday, and without any need to cut either candidate’s mic. Most good podcasts feature free-form conversations that organically converge on the most revealing or contentious aspects of a topic. They are, in other words, what a presidential debate should be.
Whereas Rogan makes a living skillfully steering such conversations, moderators tend to ruin debates, as we saw last night. Chris Wallace is a fine one-on-one interviewer with a talent for playing devil’s advocate, and he does well when tasked with moderating a panel. But his temperament was unsuited to last night’s proceedings. On numerous occasions, Wallace framed questions in the rhetoric of liberal grievance, instead of just throwing out topics and allowing the candidates to frame their own arguments. I’m sorry, calling critical race theory “racial-sensitivity training” isn’t only incredibly misleading, it’s doing Biden’s work for him.
This has been happening for decades.
When Candy Crowley inaccurately fact-checked Mitt Romney using President Obama’s talking points during a 2012 debate, she was only slightly more obvious than the vast majority of moderators had been over the preceding 30 years. Why not lean in to the bias? Let the John Harwoods of the world come out of the shadows and act as open proxies. Have one for each side, and task them with asking the other side’s candidate questions.
Right now, the biggest problem with the debates is their antiquated, heavily moderated, strictly time-constrained format, which incentivizes candidates to give the least forthcoming answers imaginable. Let the debates run for three hours — or for however long it takes. Stop providing candidates with the topics of discussion beforehand. Allow them to go at it, rather than reining them in every time they accidentally stray into some useful back-and-forth. If a candidate wants to be overly aggressive and interrupt his opponent, let him. He’s the one risking being seen as a bully by voters.
Traditional debating rules, developed over hundreds of years, are effective when an issue is being argued over by two cerebral combatants, but it doesn’t work in a wide-ranging conversation between two partisans. Institutional media types like to romanticize presidential debates, but Reagan’s best moments were quips, Obama’s were sermons, and Nixon lost because he didn’t have make-up on. These things have been tedious exercises in showmanship, gotcha zingers, and stale talking points.
We can do better. Just let them fight.
