The influence of political candidate debates on election outcomes is hard to gauge: while millions of Americans often watch them, whether or not they actually change the opinions of those voters isn't always clear. Remember that Presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama both had poor showings in their first reecletion debates, but they both still went on to win. And the rise of televised debates have lead to a certain shallowness in their effect; the first televised presidential debate was in 1960. Famously, people who just heard the debate thought that the Republican Richard Nixon defeated the Democrat John Kennedy. But people who watched it thought that Kennedy won, partly because Nixon appeared to have a line of sweat under his upper lip!
And there are too many debates, in my opinion, especially when it comes to the presidential primaries, because then you have candidates who agree on 90% of the issues trying again and again to stand out from the others. And when there are a high number of candidates, like the 17 that ran for the Republican nomination back in 2015, it becomes hard to tell most of them apart.
All that said, debates are still a good thing for the country, they can effectively sell a new candidate to the public (the debates in 2008 helped turn Barack Obama from upstart to contender), and issues and differences can be discussed in a more honest format than those annoying political ads. But there's still a change that I think needs to be made: stop holding the debates in front of live audiences.
The first Republican primary presidential debate happened two days ago, and it provided a good example of what I'm talking about: at one point, Chris Christie started to criticize Donald Trump, and the chorus of boos that resulted saw him retreat from the subject. Other moments brought more raucous reactions from the crowd, which got so unruly that the moderators had to tell them to quiet down more than once. While disruptive crowd responses are nothing new in debates, like everything in politics, things have gotten worse since Trump arrived in 2015. Since then, braying, booing crowds egging on Trump's worst statements have become the norm, trickling down into a debate that he wasn't even part of.
Personally, I think the best debate I've ever seen was the one between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in 2012 in which the two candidates were seated on chairs next to a table the whole time, with a moderator sitting in between them. There was no crowd, so there was no playing to them, no attempt to come up with the best zinger or put down, there was just a frank discussion of the issues. Now part of this is because Obama and Romney are both decent men who understood the concept of taking turns, and I'm not foolish enough to think that Trump wouldn't say anything horrible without a audience, but I still think it would tone down the chaos he brings to everything if there wasn't a crowd there goading him on.
Sadly, I can't imagine that the kind of more serious debate that I'm hoping for will ever become a reality in this country. The sad fact of the matter is that candidates insulting each other while a crowd cheers is more exciting TV than a more restrained atmosphere. So for ratings sake. we have to get used to more craziness and less seriousness in our debates pretty much forever. But I do wish we could lose the crowds.
No comments:
Post a Comment