These Debates Suck

The candidates at the July 30 debate (AP/Paul Sancya via KCCI)

I have watched all four nights of the Democratic debates so far, and what has been most striking to me is not any particular candidate's performance, but rather the simple truth that these debates have so far been terrible. I don't mean that as a commentary on the candidates' performances (though, to be sure, some of them have been terrible, too) but in terms of the very setup of each debate: the lineups, the questions, the rules, the amount of time each candidate has ended up getting—they have all absolutely sucked. That didn't keep me from getting some kind of twisted enjoyment out of watching the candidates butt heads and try (sometimes successfully) to destroy each other in front of an audience of millions. But as a means of actually informing the viewer or trying to let each candidate argue for their vision? They've been pretty dismal. Some of the reasons these first two debates (or four debates, depending on how you want to look at it) have been so bad are specific to them; but other reasons hold true more generally, and will also be true of the remaining debates.

Let's start with the reasons specific to these first debates. First of all, the lineups. It is unbelievable that after two debates that took up a total of four nights, we have yet to see Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders together on one stage. They were the three top-polling candidates before the first debate and the three top-polling candidates by the time the second debate rolled around as well. Yet, despite the fact that there have been ten candidates onstage each night, we have so far not been able to have these three candidates together in the same place at the same time for either debate. This is frankly ridiculous. My opinion from early on has been that the debates should simply be broken up by polling numbers: the first night, the ten highest-polling candidates should debate; the second night, the eleventh through twentieth highest-polling candidates should debate (or vice versa—the order of the nights isn't the point).

But wait, isn't that unfair? Doesn't it deprive the lower-polling candidates of the same opportunity as the higher-polling ones? Maybe, but who cares? If you're polling in eleventh place at this point in the race, you're probably not going to be the nominee. I realize that polling this far out isn't especially reliable, but we're talking about candidates eleventh place and lower, which is to say, polling at around 1% or less. Plus, in the last election cycle the Republicans broke their debates up by polling and that didn't seem to deprive the lower-tier candidates of their chance; everyone said Carly Fiorina won the "kiddie table" debate and she was suddenly talked about as a serious contender, and even allowed to appear with the high-polling candidates at the next debate. Then she petered out because people weren't actually that interested in her, which was why she was polling so low to begin with.

It's much more valuable for us to have the leading candidates—the ones who are already attracting the most support—square off so we can see the similarities and differences between their policies and ideas. The fact that the most recent debate had neither Warren nor Sanders on the same stage as Biden is a huge loss. Few, if any, of the candidates Biden shared a stage with have visions that contrast as strongly with his, and there was no one to forcefully take him on over Medicare for All in the same way Sanders or Warren could have. How about instead of obsessing over what's fair to low-polling candidates who are embarking on personal vanity projects, we consider what's fair to the people watching these debates? Schadenfreude aside, no one wanted to watch Sanders and Warren spend half their night dragging a political nobody like John Delaney.

Second, and specific to the most recent debate: CNN is so awful. The questions at their debate(s) sounded like they'd been written by someone from the National Review. Here's an example: "Senator Warren, you want to make it U.S. policy that the U.S. will never use a nuclear weapon unless another country uses one first. Now, President Obama reportedly considered that policy, but ultimately decided against it. Why should the U.S. tie its own hands with that policy?" Yes, why do you want the United States to "tie its own hands" by saying that it won't start a nuclear war? And no, this isn't just some sort of devil's advocate type phrasing; the questions were consistently slanted in the same direction. Here's another example:

Senator Sanders, President Trump has argued that the United States cannot continue to be the, quote, "policeman of the world." You said the exact same thing on a debate stage in 2016. If voters are hearing the same message from you and President Trump on the issue of military intervention, how should they expect that you will be any different from him?

A few questions later, in contrast, we get this:

Congressman [Ryan], you've said that you would not meet with North Korea dictator Kim Jong-un unless you were at least close to a deal. Now, Senator Klobuchar says that she would, quote, "always be willing to meet with leaders to discuss policies." Is that view wrong?

Note that there's no loaded phrasing here: no "why would you limit your efforts at diplomacy by refusing to meet with the leader of another country?" or "why single out Kim-Jong Un when presidents meet with autocratic rulers all the time?" Just a perfectly nondescript "It that view wrong?" It's a consistent pattern.

Also consistent were the attempts to stir up some reality show-style drama by personalizing every remark. For example:

And previously you have said, when asked about your primary opponents, quote, "A lot of people are making promises, and I'm not going to make promises just to get elected." Who on this stage is making promises just to get elected?

Who are you talking about? Who's fearmongering?

Who's offering a false choice here?

In the last debate, [Elizabeth Warren] said the politicians who are not supporting Medicare for All simply lack the will to fight for it. You do not support Medicare for All. Is Senator Warren correct? Do you just not lack [sic] the will to fight for it?

These are blatant attempts to incite squabbling between candidates, and in no way do they actually have any value in terms of highlighting the candidates' policy differences. Who Amy Klobuchar thinks is making false promises, who Beto O'Rourke believes is offering a false choice, and who Bill de Blasio is implicitly accusing of fearmongering are really not relevant questions. What the candidates believe each others' motivations to be should not be of great interest to voters, who are perfectly able to make up their own minds about what each candidate's motivations are—and the idea that candidates need to spell out who they're attacking with jibes like these is just insulting to the viewers' intelligence. If the candidates want to go after each other (and they often do) let them, but don't try to provoke pointless bickering about their opinions of one another.

This same inclination to provoke as much conflict as possible makes itself obvious when we look at who the moderators allowed to speak. John Delaney—who is, again, a political nobody polling at about 1% —got called on, by my count, at least eleven times, not counting opening or closing statements. The moderators were eager to bring him into the conversation not because he's in any way relevant (he isn't) but because they knew he would clash with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (not shocking, given his net worth is in the tens of millions).

So those are the issues specific to the debates we've had so far. But thankfully not every debate will be hosted by CNN, and so far only nine candidates have qualified to take part in the next debate (which is scheduled for mid-September)—meaning we may finally have our three frontrunners onstage together. Unfortunately, though, the problems go much deeper than that.

For one thing, while CNN's questions were perhaps especially egregious, they're not exactly a sharp deviation from the norm. For instance, the second night of the first debate (which was not hosted by CNN) kicked off with this question: "will taxes go up for the middle class in a Sanders administration? And if so, how do you sell that to voters?" This might not seem unfair, but notice that the converse isn't asked of candidates who oppose free college and Medicare for All: "Why do you want the middle class to keep paying more for healthcare and college than many would pay if Medicare for All and free college tuition were adopted?" Even taking into account new taxes, these policies would generally save less-wealthy people money, compared to the alternative—which is why they're being proposed in the first place. Another question that has yet to be asked of candidates who support a public option rather than single-payer health insurance: "Won't your program create a two-tiered system, where the poorest and sickest are forced to rely on the public option, making it more vulnerable to spending cuts given that wealthier people won't have to depend on it and have no reason to defend it?"

Another gem from the first debate (this time from the first night): "who is the [greatest] geopolitical threat to the United States?" Right, because the country that spends by far the most on its military and operates a massive global empire in which it acts with almost complete impunity should really be concerned about external geopolitical threats. There was no question asked that night about the very real threat the United States poses to Yemen, for instance, given its complicity in the mass slaughter that's been going on there for years, but thankfully we found time to ask questions about which group or country the candidates think might someday potentially harm the United States in some manner.

This sort of thing is not an oversight, but rather a product of the ideological framework in which the mainstream media operates. Not surprisingly, corporate-owned media outlets that rely on advertising revenue are not that eager to highlight the injustices of the "free market" system—or to challenge the idea of the United States government's fundamentally benevolent role in the world, given that corporate and state power are deeply intertwined in American society. I'm not suggesting some kind of conspiracy but rather an issue of the culture that exists inside the institutions of the Free Press. Anyone who wants to better understand what I mean would do well to read some of Noam Chomsky (and his occasional co-writer Edward Herman)'s critiques of the media—critiques which perhaps especially apply here.

This bias, as Herman and Chomsky would note, manifests itself in even subtler and more fundamental ways. Just look at the rules of the debates. Typically, candidates are given one minute to respond and even shorter amounts of time for follow-ups and clarifications. The very nature of a setup like this implicitly favors the status quo. Think about it: if someone says something completely outside of the mainstream—for instance, "the United States is the greatest threat to world peace today" (a view held by a plurality of people across 65 nations, according to one poll)—they will have an extremely small amount of time to justify a statement that may strike viewers as completely insane just because of how different it is from what they're used to hearing. Imagine going back a few centuries and trying to present a persuasive argument for women's suffrage, or racial equality, or LGBTQ+ rights, in a single minute. Or, to expand our examples outside of politics, imagine if Galileo had been given one minute to explain that the Earth revolves around the sun, or Charles Darwin to explain his theory of evolution, or Albert Einstein to explain his theory of relativity. Sometimes it's even worse: for the question I quoted above about the greatest geopolitical threat to the United States, Chuck Todd asked for a "one-word answer." Thankfully, public consciousness has shifted enough that one could answer "climate change" and not be seen as a lunatic or a naive hippie, but if someone had given an answer that was at all out of the ordinary, they would have had no opportunity to even justify it (unless they bent the rules as some candidates naturally did—but even then their explanation would have to be about one sentence long). The world is a complicated place, and politics are no exception to that rule, but from the way the debates are set up one might think each issue is roughly as complicated as cooking a pack of ramen noodles.

Rather than simply harping on the problems with modern political debates though, let us take a look at some examples that contrast with them. Let's start out with probably the most famous set of debates in American history: the Lincoln-Douglas debates. These debates, of course, played a major role in elevating Abraham Lincoln's profile and allowing him to ultimately become the 16th president of the United States, a role that it's generally agreed he handled pretty well. The structure for these debates is remarkably different from anything we see in political debates today. In each of the seven debates, one candidate spoke for a full hour, followed by the other candidate speaking for ninety minutes and then back to the first for a final 30 minute-long response. During their speeches the candidates were not peppered by questions from the moderators, but were rather allowed to present their arguments directly. Furthermore, the central issue throughout all of the debates was slavery and its expansion which, it's fair to say, was indeed the most pressing issue at the time. This issue was thus given a very and extensive discussion, unlike any of the issues in today's political debates.

Or, let's take a more modern example from outside electoral politics: the debate this year between Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson, about Marxism, capitalism and happiness. To be clear, I don't view either of these men as necessarily intellectual titans. I think Peterson is a right-wing charlatan who traffics in misogyny other forms of bigotry, and that Žižek, while interesting and certainly capable of making good points, usually offers up gratuitously tortuous and complex analyses that are perhaps best treated as entertainment rather than as having any great practical value (as entertainment, though, they have my strong recommendation). But nonetheless, the example is worth looking at. Each speaker was given 30 minutes for an opening statement, 10 minutes to respond to the other's opening statement, and then about 45 minutes was allotted for answering questions from the moderator and the audience (though ultimately Žižek and Peterson ended up largely talking among themselves in lieu of answering questions). As a consequence, there was a real interchange of ideas here. Even if you'd had no familiarity with either of these people before the debate, you would have gained a real idea of what each one believes, and the debate saw the two genuinely respond to each others' arguments, find areas of agreement, examine their disagreements and make their cases in detail. You might find everything that either one of them said to be completely useless and vapid, but nonetheless as a viewer you got the opportunity to really try to understand both men and what they believe. If you didn't find the debate enlightening at all, you could only blame the debaters themselves, not the format or the moderator or anyone or anything else.

Indeed, in both of these examples, the point is not what was said, but what could be said; there is certainly something morally obscene about two white men debating slavery, and to even have a debate over the institution of slavery to begin with rightly seems monstrous to us now. But the debates did permit each candidate to make their arguments as well as they could and ultimately helped Lincoln become president, eventually resulting in the abolition of slavery. The Žižek-Peterson debate may leave you completely unimpressed with both participants, but it at least offers you the opportunity to truly hear them out in their own words before you make that judgment. Regardless of the content in both cases, the format did allow for a serious and detailed discussion.

The format for the Democratic debates (and modern political debates in general), on the contrary, doesn't do this and isn't designed to. Sure, it's intended to highlight the differences between the candidates, but it doesn't offer any serious insight into where those differences really come from, or any sort of thoughtful examination of the biggest issues humanity faces. Rather, it's political theater: it's an opportunity for each candidate to spit out their pre-packaged talking points (they all have them) and then engage in battles of one-upmanship with their competitors. Say what you will about Andrew Yang (and I'm no great fan of his), but he hit on this point pretty succinctly in his closing statement at the most recent debate:

Instead of talking about automation and our future...we're up here with makeup on our faces and our rehearsed attack lines, playing roles in this reality TV show.  It's one reason why we elected a reality TV star as our president.

Of course, the format of Lincoln-Douglas debates, or any other format that's designed for two speakers, could hardly accommodate 10 candidates—and yes, it would be hard to have any sort of very in-depth discussion between that many people while making sure everyone had a chance to be heard. But I do think there's a great deal of room for improvement.

Not that it matters much, but here's my tentative proposal for the Democratic primary debates: first of all, limit each debate to one topic. Particularly important and complex topics (like climate change) could have more than one debate devoted to them. There are 12 debates planned, so it doesn't seem absurd to think we could make this work and perhaps have a few "miscellaneous" debates thrown in where a variety of issues will be addressed. That way, something resembling an in-depth discussion on each issue is at least remotely possible.

Secondly, as long as there are ten candidates per debate night, give each candidate five minutes for an opening statement, then (in randomized order) give them five more minutes to respond to each others' opening statements, bringing us to 100 minutes of debate time. After that, have, say 30 minutes to an hour where candidates are allowed to ask each other questions and/or respond to questions from viewers (obviously this means the network hosting the debate would likely be able to cherry-pick which questions, but at least there might be time for more thoughtful discussions). As more candidates drop out and the number of debate participants gets smaller, more time can be allotted for each candidate's opening and response statements.

I don't think that this would elevate the debates to some plane of great intellectual discussion. A lot of candidates would still say stupid things and rely on talking points, but it would offer a greater opportunity for viewers to get some idea of who's relying on talking points and who has some actual vision and sincerity. Granted, we would have to put up with hearing minor candidates talk for two uninterrupted stretches of five minutes, which could be kind of dull, but at least the major candidates would have that same opportunity.

Of course, this plan, or any other that's likely to have a similar effect, will not be adopted, for the reasons mentioned above. I offer it up simply to make the point that these debates really could be better. The point of this blog post, though, is not entirely just cathartic griping. I want to leave my readers with a warning: do not let yourself be sucked into these things. Don't let debate performances (emphasis on "performances") decide your vote for you. And if you think the debates so far have not been very enlightening or inspiring, know that that's probably not going to get too much better, but that the reasons for it go beyond this particular batch of candidates, whatever you think of them. In short: don't be fooled.

Update: This post has been changed to accurately reflect the number of candidates that have so far qualified for the next debate.