Opinion > Columnists > Davis Merritt

  Davis Merritt  

Voters not focus of candidate 'debates'

We're threatened with at least one more Democratic debate as the party's endless and dispiriting primary season chugs toward closure. Please, no mas.

Debates between major candidates should be a boon to the democratic process. With television and online coverage, vigorous follow-up conversations among citizens, and reactions on blogs both outrageous and sensible, the marketplace of ideas should be well-served and invigorated.

But that rarely turns out to be the case, and ABC News' Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos demonstrated again last week why voters are consistently denied the potential benefits of such face-to-face occasions. And if the proposed CBS show in North Carolina comes off April 27, we'll get to see the embattled Katie Couric try to show her chops and salvage her career.

That's precisely the problem. The "debates" are really about the networks and personalities who host them. As one experienced political watcher revealingly said of the alleged need of another debate, "CBS does need that break and Katie needs that break."

Well, give us a break. We need something much better, and so do the candidates. Harassing them further with irrelevances simply to perk up a failed star's ratings is an abuse of both journalism and democracy.

Gibson and Stephanopoulos are quite competent at their regular jobs, a nightly news broadcast and Sunday talk show. But last week's prime-time broadcast was primarily about punching their tickets for this campaign season.

The most revealing evidence was their beating anew of a couple of dead-horse stories: Barack Obama's off-the-wall pastor and Hillary Clinton's fairy tale about Bosnian snipers.

Each candidate has responded to those deep embarrassments dozens of times. While their explanations -- Clinton stupidly made it up, Obama reacted ineptly -- are wholly insufficient, that's all they can or will say on those subjects. The hosts' doggedness was calculated only to invent a "gotcha" even this late in the game.

And then there were the now-obligatory "concerned-citizen questions," which are neither spontaneous nor revealing, including the one about why Obama does not wear a flag pin.

The two-hour show -- the actual "debate" being much shorter than that, because of numerous commercials -- was merely a dodgeball game for the candidates (face it, network execs and anchors, these candidates are smarter than you) and a testosterone evaluation for the hosts. Left out were the informational needs of voters, who became merely props for the networks.

If we must have debates for the general election, we need a series of actual conversations on specific issues -- such as the economy one time, foreign affairs the next -- with experts in those fields asking the questions and challenging the responses.

We could start with one devoted to the silly nonissues, just to get those out of the way so voters can, in the others, hear in depth what each candidate intends to do once in office.

We might even allow journalists to moderate the "gotcha" event, since they are so enamored of the genre, then turn the rest over to knowledgeable academics and professionals. This might necessarily involve pairs of questioners, as few true experts lack a point of view of their own. But better that potential cumbersomeness than the existing showbiz foolishness.

Davis Merritt is a former editor of The Eagle. Reach him at dmerritt9@cox.net.