POLITICS
The Dog Days of Politics
By Stump Connolly
They call this time of year the dog days in journalism because it’s so hot you can’t get a dog to go out walking the streets. It’s a time of scant news, editor vacations and now, it turns out, presidential debates staged for their entertainment value.
The CNN/YouTube Democratic debate Monday was up against some stiff competition – Wife Swap, Age of Love and Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader -- but it managed to hold it’s own. Questions about global warming from a melting snowman, two Tennessee bumpkins wondering whether Al Gore’s media attention hurt the candidates’ feelings, and a singing question about taxes spiced up the evening -- and gave all the candidates a chance to show they have a sense of humor.
Anderson Cooper moved the show along like a well-rehearsed Bert Parks, scattering different questions to only two or three different candidates (much to the consternation of Mike Gravel, who whined that he didn’t get enough face time) and limiting responses to a level of brevity that must have made Joe Biden feel like he was answering in haiku.
All in all the media response to the format was positive. They even got a tidbit of news out of the debate in the exchange between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton over whether they would or would not be willing to meet with rogue foreign leaders in North Korea, Cuba or Venezuela. “The debate was certainly more lively than the usual candidate face-off,” Adam Cohen wrote in The New York Times. “It was a bad night for news anchors and Washington bureau chiefs,” added Steve Johnson in the Tribune because, as John Dickerson wrote in Slate, “The highly hyped experiment in user-generated content worked. In the privacy of their homes, people were at ease, and their videos reflected that. They sounded human. Had the same people been standing in the auditorium at the Citadel in Charleston, S.C., asking questions, they would have frozen up or tried to sound too polished.”
The proof of the TV debate’s success was in the pudding, or in television terms, the ratings: 2.8 million viewers (200,000 more than any previous debate this season) with impressive numbers in the coveted 18-34 age bracket. But even the novelty of the YouTube debate could not overcome the fundamental flaw in these things: too many candidates in too little time.
Hillary Clinton and John Edwards took flack after an earlier debate when off-camera mics caught them complaining about the gangbang approach to issues and promising to get their staffs together to work out a more closed-in arrangement. But Gail Collins, writing in The New York Times editorial page last Sunday, took up the cause and proposed her own television format: an American Idol series of debates where every week viewers vote off an obvious loser until only the strong survive.
I have my own suggestion, as long as we’re
in the silly season.
How about a March Madness debate tournament this August modeled after
the NCAA basketball tournament. We divide the eight candidates into brackets,
pit one against another based on national polls in quarterfinal and semi-final
rounds, then let the last two candidates standing duke it out in Monday night
primetime. We could call it the ESPN/Note debates.
Hillary Clinton (#1 seed) would face off against Mike Gravel (#8); Barack Obama (#2) could go against Dennis Kucinich (#7), John Edwards (#3) against Chris Dodd (#6), and Bill Richardson (#4) against Joe Biden (#5). In an hour-long format, each candidate would have at least one chance to talk at length about his or her positions: and we could throw in a lightning round or daily double question if that gets too tedious.
The cumulative effect of holding these debates on Friday, Saturday and Monday would give the spinmeisters ample time to force the candidates who move on to explain exactly what they meant in the earlier rounds, and oppositional research teams in each campaign time to zero in on the other guy's vulnerabilities.
It’s fair, it’s fun and, more important, in this silly season when no one cares about television or politics, it will fill a lot of airtime. Who knows? The Gonzaga U of politics might just turn out to be Mike Gravel. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants!
