Making Presidential Debates Great Again

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Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Gage Skidmore

Here are a few suggestions to make these vapid events worth their viewers' time.

Riddle me this, Batman: what has two presidential candidates and sucks?

Answer: presidential debates.

How bad have these quadrennial exercises in vapidity gotten?  Bad enough that it’s been decades since I’ve watched one.  Much better to follow Townhall’s “live blog” on the internet, where, as often as not, what the bloggers say about the candidates and their responses is more illuminating than the responses.

Best of all, I don’t have to listen to the moderators, this year’s being especially bad — the choice of questions, the bailing out of the Democratic candidate with “fact-checking” of “facts” that later turn out to be wrong.  And, of course, the choices of the moderators themselves and the venues: this year, those paragons of objectivity CNN and ABC.

To paraphrase King Henry, will no one rid us of these meddlesome moderators?  That remains to be seen, but when and if there’s a will, there’s certainly a way.  Here are four ways to make presidential debates great again.

The quintessential proto-debate, if you will — the one that inspired the Nixon-Kennedy debates and cursed us with a presidential debate in every presidential season since, is the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas.  The format was simple:

In each debate either Douglas or Lincoln would open with an hour address.  The other would then speak for an hour and a half.  The first then had 30 minutes of rebuttal.

Total time, three hours — a bit long for modern audiences, especially today’s “TikTok generation,” for whom three minutes may be an eternity.   But what about half that length — 90 minutes, the apparent “standard” for modern debates?  Candidate A opens with a half-hour address, Candidate B speaks for 45 minutes, and Candidate A gets a 15-minute rebuttal.  How much more would we learn about the candidates who are required to speak at length than what can be gleaned from the current two-minute-two-minute-one-minute format?

Or how about the traditional Oxford debate format, which has served the Oxford Union well for over 200 years?  The Oxford format is virtually the same as Lincoln-Douglas, with the important difference that in Oxford, opponents debate a specific proposal, which provides both foundation and focus.  To wit, using Donald Trump and Kamala Harris as examples:

• Proposed: Kamala Harris should be the next president of the United States.
• Proposed: Donald Trump should be the next president of the United States.

The candidate who is the subject of a proposal would speak first, followed by a rebuttal by the opponent, and so on.  A coin flip could decide which of the two debates is held first.

Another possible format could be what one could call the “timed chess match” format.  In timed chess matches, each player has a clock and an equal amount of time.  When a player completes a move, that player hits a button that stops his clock and starts the other player’s clock — and so on and so on, until checkmate, draw, or one player’s time runs out, in which case the player whose time runs out loses.

Adapting the timed chess match format to a 90-minute presidential debate, each candidate would get a clock and 45 minutes to say whatever he wants for as long as wants, then hits a button to stop his clock and start the other candidate’s clock.  But here’s the beautiful part for those who value brevity and clarity: when a candidate’s time runs out, his microphone automatically shuts off, leaving the other candidate speaks freely — and, most importantly, unopposed — for whatever time he has left on his clock.  With the timed chess match format, we would have a powerful incentive for candidates to be succinct and concise so as to preserve as much of their time as possible.

Last — and in this writer’s opinion, least — if we absolutely must have the current format, where one or more moderators compose and ask questions to which candidates get, at most, two minutes to reply, here is a proposal that keeps most of the current format but at least avoids wasting the public’s time with useless softball questions:

• Instead of the current procedure, where the host, usually a TV station, chooses the moderators, the candidates would choose.  Each candidate would choose an equal number of moderators, who would compose and ask the questions.  Indeed, the candidates could even collaborate with their chosen moderators in deciding the questions.  But, one could reasonably ask, would that such an arrangement not exacerbate, indeed incentivize each candidate’s moderators to ask softball questions to “his” candidate and hardball questions to the other candidate?  No, it would not, because…
• Each candidate would take questions only from the other candidate’s chosen moderators.

Imagine, for example, a Democrat candidate choosing Rachel Maddow and the Republican choosing Ben Shapiro.  In such a case, the Democrat can expect tough questions from Ben Shapiro, the Republican tough questions from Rachel Maddow — and no softballs to either, because the Democrat would get no questions from Maddow and the Republican no questions from Shapiro.

What all of the above formats have in common is that they take the venues and the moderators out of the equation, relegating the moderators, whoever they are, to the role of mere timekeepers.  If the moderators are limited to introducing the candidates; explaining the debate rules; announcing commercial breaks, if any; announcing the end of the debate; and watching the clock, who cares who the moderators are or where the debates are held?

Lincoln and Douglas, however opposed they were on the issues of their day, would be equally appalled to see what the tradition they pioneered has become.  Kennedy and Nixon, too.

Let us therefore resolve to replace what today passes for “debate” with a new format worthy of the name.

Make presidential debates great again!

Gene Schwimmer is the proprietor of Gene’s Geopolitical Thought for the Day on YouTube.

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Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.