Jason McCullough
08-15-2008, 02:23 PM
James Fallows (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200809/fallows-debates) risks insanity by watching all 47 primary debates. He develops an interesting set of observations.
Because his major speeches were so influential, long, and carefully wrought, it seems natural to conclude that today’s bear-baiting debates are just the wrong vehicle for him. “You’ve got to remember, he is a constitutional-law professor,” I was told by Newton Minow, who as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under John F. Kennedy declared television a “vast wasteland” and who as a partner in the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin hired Obama as a summer associate 19 years ago. “He’s used to seeing all sides of an issue, and he tends to lay out all sides before giving his own view.” By that time, the clock has run out.
That’s true, but it can’t be the whole answer. There was a time when he seemed naturally suited to rapid-fire debate, as I found by watching an earlier and less familiar set of Obama’s debate performances. The contrast is not as stark as one I discussed in an article before the presidential debates of 2004, which concerned George W. Bush’s transformation from the on-point and seemingly silver-tongued Texas politician who bested Democratic opponents in gubernatorial debates in the 1990s to the aphasic figure we have known on the national scene. But it is readily apparent. The Obama who took on the Republican ambassador, perennial presidential candidate, talk-show host, and motormouth Alan Keyes in the Illinois Senate debates of 2004—a relaxed, funny politician unafraid to go jab for jab—differed noticeably from the surprisingly tentative, slow-to-attack candidate who survived but did not triumph through this season’s debates.
The section on the terrible moderators is depressing as hell.
The 40-plus people who served as moderators through the debate season varied widely in their assertiveness and willingness to act as if the assembled politicians were just another set of guests on a talk show. Local newspeople plus those from PBS and NPR tended to be the most respectful. Wolf Blitzer was the most intrusive and self-aggrandizing. His CNN colleague Anderson Cooper, who moderated the YouTube debates for both parties with video questions from viewers, was at the other extreme, with a nice combination of assertiveness and good-humored restraint. Along with Cooper, the other moderator who best kept control without hogging the stage was Brian Williams of NBC. Williams was in charge of the very first Democratic debate, on April 26 of last year, in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Yet it was the smooth, non-histrionic Williams who put the candidates through a series of stunts.
Raise your hand if you’ve owned a gun. Raise your hand if you “believe there is such a thing as a global war on terror.” Raise your hand if you support Representative Dennis Kucinich’s plan to impeach Dick Cheney. On the merits, these were not really ideal yes/no questions—especially the most important of them, about the war on terror, in which the only things that matter are the reasoning and plans that would come after the yes or the no. But the amazing part of this process was the sheer indignity of it. All eight of these people had been public officials. Odds were that one among them would be the next president of the United States. Yet they compliantly held up their hands like grade-schoolers or contestants on Fear Factor. While candidates are subjected to almost everything during a long primary season and are used to skepticism and outright hostility from the press, serving as game-show props represented something new.
In January of this year, two Hillary Clinton staffers—Sidney Blumenthal, who had been a close counselor to Bill Clinton and was even closer to his wife; and a law student named Daniel Freifeld—produced a taxonomy of the Democratic debates to that point. Their internal memo began, in all caps:
15 DEBATES
352 QUESTIONS
29 GOTCHA QUESTIONS
33 PUFF QUESTIONS
7 GOVERNANCE QUESTIONS
NOT A SINGLE QUESTION ABOUT A FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OR AGENCY AND ITS CONDITION UNDER BUSH
“Gotcha” questions were the familiar attempt to find any difference between a candidate’s position today and what he or she had ever said before. “Puffs” were open-ended speculative questions: “What is your favorite Bible verse?” all of the Democrats were asked at the end of a debate in New Hampshire on September 26. “Governance” questions, of course, concerned how the trillion-dollar federal enterprise does its work (though the category excluded questions about the military’s performance in Iraq).
Because his major speeches were so influential, long, and carefully wrought, it seems natural to conclude that today’s bear-baiting debates are just the wrong vehicle for him. “You’ve got to remember, he is a constitutional-law professor,” I was told by Newton Minow, who as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under John F. Kennedy declared television a “vast wasteland” and who as a partner in the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin hired Obama as a summer associate 19 years ago. “He’s used to seeing all sides of an issue, and he tends to lay out all sides before giving his own view.” By that time, the clock has run out.
That’s true, but it can’t be the whole answer. There was a time when he seemed naturally suited to rapid-fire debate, as I found by watching an earlier and less familiar set of Obama’s debate performances. The contrast is not as stark as one I discussed in an article before the presidential debates of 2004, which concerned George W. Bush’s transformation from the on-point and seemingly silver-tongued Texas politician who bested Democratic opponents in gubernatorial debates in the 1990s to the aphasic figure we have known on the national scene. But it is readily apparent. The Obama who took on the Republican ambassador, perennial presidential candidate, talk-show host, and motormouth Alan Keyes in the Illinois Senate debates of 2004—a relaxed, funny politician unafraid to go jab for jab—differed noticeably from the surprisingly tentative, slow-to-attack candidate who survived but did not triumph through this season’s debates.
The section on the terrible moderators is depressing as hell.
The 40-plus people who served as moderators through the debate season varied widely in their assertiveness and willingness to act as if the assembled politicians were just another set of guests on a talk show. Local newspeople plus those from PBS and NPR tended to be the most respectful. Wolf Blitzer was the most intrusive and self-aggrandizing. His CNN colleague Anderson Cooper, who moderated the YouTube debates for both parties with video questions from viewers, was at the other extreme, with a nice combination of assertiveness and good-humored restraint. Along with Cooper, the other moderator who best kept control without hogging the stage was Brian Williams of NBC. Williams was in charge of the very first Democratic debate, on April 26 of last year, in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Yet it was the smooth, non-histrionic Williams who put the candidates through a series of stunts.
Raise your hand if you’ve owned a gun. Raise your hand if you “believe there is such a thing as a global war on terror.” Raise your hand if you support Representative Dennis Kucinich’s plan to impeach Dick Cheney. On the merits, these were not really ideal yes/no questions—especially the most important of them, about the war on terror, in which the only things that matter are the reasoning and plans that would come after the yes or the no. But the amazing part of this process was the sheer indignity of it. All eight of these people had been public officials. Odds were that one among them would be the next president of the United States. Yet they compliantly held up their hands like grade-schoolers or contestants on Fear Factor. While candidates are subjected to almost everything during a long primary season and are used to skepticism and outright hostility from the press, serving as game-show props represented something new.
In January of this year, two Hillary Clinton staffers—Sidney Blumenthal, who had been a close counselor to Bill Clinton and was even closer to his wife; and a law student named Daniel Freifeld—produced a taxonomy of the Democratic debates to that point. Their internal memo began, in all caps:
15 DEBATES
352 QUESTIONS
29 GOTCHA QUESTIONS
33 PUFF QUESTIONS
7 GOVERNANCE QUESTIONS
NOT A SINGLE QUESTION ABOUT A FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OR AGENCY AND ITS CONDITION UNDER BUSH
“Gotcha” questions were the familiar attempt to find any difference between a candidate’s position today and what he or she had ever said before. “Puffs” were open-ended speculative questions: “What is your favorite Bible verse?” all of the Democrats were asked at the end of a debate in New Hampshire on September 26. “Governance” questions, of course, concerned how the trillion-dollar federal enterprise does its work (though the category excluded questions about the military’s performance in Iraq).