IS IT TIME TO RETURN TO THE
ROUGH AND TUMBLE DEBATES OF OLD?
The San Antonio Express-News
Carlos Guerra
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Pollsters, you may recall, kicked
off this presidential season campaign with smug predictions that very
few undecided voters in a handful of battleground states would pick the
winner. But since then, their polls have vacillated erratically and, more
than once, produced wildly disparate results.
The vacillation was still evident Wednesday, when Electoral-Vote.com's
tally of state polls showed President Bush leading Sen. John Kerry 273-241.
But excluding states with differences within the margins of error, the
count dropped to 221-171 - well short of the 270 electoral votes needed
- and similar to Rasmussen Report's latest tally of 213-196.
It's little wonder that the pundits will be glued to their TVs tonight
as the campaign's so-called debate phase kicks off.
But you won't see a debate, says George Farah, founding director of Open
Debates, a nonpartisan group with conservative, centrist and liberal backers
that is trying to wrest control of the presidential debates from the two
parties and give it back to some truly nonpartisan, unaligned sponsor.
"What you'll get is a parallel presentation of sound bites that will occur
on the same stage at the same time," he says, with the candidates parroting
well-rehearsed lines that may not even be responsive, and they'll get
away with it.
After the historic Kennedy-Nixon match-up in 1960, the next debates were
in 1976 and were sponsored by the League of Women Voters. And the League
kept sponsoring them through 1984, each time having to fend off stronger
efforts by the parties to take them over.
Then, before the 1988 elections, the two parties signed a memorandum of
understanding that created the Commission on Presidential Debates to take
over the debates, keep third-party and independent hopefuls out, tame
the formats, pick the questioners, limit the issues and turn them into
pabulum.
As the memoranda have grown in length and specificity, TV audiences have
shrunk - by more than 26 million viewers between 1992 and 2000.
"We would like an independent debate sponsor that is more concerned with
voter education than in allowing the candidates to manipulate these important
civic events," Farah says. "Our democracy needs frank and open dialogue
and that's not what we're getting.
"The campaigns are more managed and scripted, and more and more about
staying on message and repeating sound bites," he says, and very important
issues are simply going unmentioned.
"It's unlikely that immigration will be discussed, or homelessness, or
the fact that there are frank differences about free trade in this country,"
Farah says. "And issues such as corporate crime waves aren't likely to
be talked about, and neither will the problems with our presidential campaigns."
What would his group like?
"There should be a back-and-forth dialogue between the candidates, where
they ask each other questions, and response times are too short," he continues.
"You can't talk about an issue thoroughly in 90 seconds, and there needs
to be follow-ups. And if (a candidate) veers off into another subject,
they need to be called on that, and there needs to be rebuttals."
And one more thing needed, he says, is: "There should be more debates.
This is the most important job in the world and we're getting, what, 4
1/2 hours?"
I'll wait for tonight's "battle," but clearly, giving the two parties
control doesn't make much sense.
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