Tag Archives: debates

Five Reasons Why Democrats Shouldn’t Downplay Their Debates

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As has been widely discussed, this year the Democratic presidential debates are on the down-low.  Democratic National Committee (DNC) leaders have decided to downplay their presidential debates, by limiting the sheer number of them, and airing some of them on Friday and Saturday evenings, when viewership levels are always very low.  Finding a Democratic presidential debate in the 2016 campaign is like finding Waldo, and it’s very much by design.So_far__the_Republican_debates_are_way_more_popular_than_the_Democratic_debates_-_Vox

I understand party leaders’ thinking.  They are all too aware that presidential debates highlight divisive intra-party squabbles in front of millions of viewers, and they sincerely believe that this kind of public bickering is bad for party unity.  They are concerned that wounds opened in debates won’t heal quickly enough, and that the intra-party criticisms will be used by Republicans in the General Election to embarrass and damage the party’s nominee.

Moreover, party leaders worry that a large number of divisive debates could make the contentious primary season last longer than it would if the establishment-friendly front-runner wins early in the process, as a result of challengers being starved of public attention by a dearth of debate exposure.  A short primary season makes for a more stable and better funded nominee, the thinking goes.

I understand all that, and agree that a series of prominent debates does pose risks to a political party.  Goodness knows, Democratic leaders watching the flame-throwing in the Republican debates probably feel vindicated by their decision to keep their debates in the shadows.

But in the final analysis, the strategy is short-sighted.  Here are five reasons why:

1.  IT FREES REPUBLICANS TO LEVEL CHARGES REPEATEDLY AND UNREBUTTED.  When Republican debates are many and prominent, while Democratic debates are few and obscure, that means that Republican key messages, claims and rebuttals dominate.   That makes most news cycles heavily slanted in a pro-Republican way, particularly because reporters increasingly shirk from holding Republicans accountable for  demonstrably false assertions.   “Democrats have destroyed the economy.”  “Nation building in the middle east is easy.”  “Tax cuts for the wealthy create jobs.”  “Obamacare isn’t helping anyone.” “The stimulus and bailouts didn’t work.” “Minimum wage increases kill jobs.”  In politics, a lie unrebutted is a lie believed.  When Republicans effectively gets the news media stage to themselves  for many months, the risk is that swing voters will swing Republican.  Moreover, all  of this message pounding can demoralize the Democrats’ electoral base, which can mean that the Democratic faithful fail to vote in November.

2.  IT RUNS THE RISK OF KILLING OFF THE PARTY’S MOST COMPETITIVE CANDIDATE. Debates are auditions of sorts, and sometimes they reveal surprising truths about political competitiveness.  For instance, in part because the debates were numerous and heavily watched in 2008, Barack Obama was able to show voters that he, to the surprise of many party leaders, was the most capable candidate to lead the party to victory.  It would be very difficult for an Obama to defeat a front-runner in the current debate-poor environment.  Healthy parties need auditions that are not rigged.

3.  IT HURTS THE PARTY’S ABILITY TO DEVELOP A “DEEP BENCH.”  Political parties need to develop rising stars, or lesser known leaders who are talented and becoming increasingly known and admired by voters.    Having a a full pipeline of such rising stars ensures that the party will have energizing and viable candidates in future elections.   For instance, even if someone like Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley isn’t viable in the 2016 primaries, debate experience and exposure can help a leader like him become a rising star.  Developing a pipeline of such rising stars is an understated but hugely important benefit of multiple prime time presidential debates.

4.  LOOKING ANTI-DEMOCRATIC COMPROMISES THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S BRAND.  All of these stories about party leaders intentionally limiting  debates tarnishes the Democratic Party brand.  In an electoral environment that is very hostile towards the DC partisan establishment, it makes the Democratic establishment look heavy handed, insecure, cynical, top-down, manipulative, power hungry and/or ashamed of its policies, ideas and leaders.  The resulting brand damage might make it a bit more difficult to attract establishment-wary swing voters in the General Election.

5.  IT LEAVES THE FRONT-RUNNER RHETORICALLY OUT-OF-SHAPE.  Just as athletes need stiff competition to reach their full potential, presidential candidates need competition to improve.  Prominent debates under the klieg lights provide that competitive arena.  Candidates need to get good at presenting their ideas and proposals in crisp, compelling ways.  They need to learn how to defend against their personal and political vulnerabilities.  They need to prepare themselves to inspire confidence on literally hundreds of policy and non-policy topics.  So in an environment with just a few, obscure debates, a front-runner can get fat and happy, rhetorically speaking.   That can mean that the party finds itself with a weak and vulnerable campaigner during the intense summer and fall General Election season.

So, DNC, let’s ease up on the Machiavellian reigns a bit.  Let them debate, even though it will get dirty and bloody.  Prominent presidential debates ultimately will do the party more good than harm.

Put Out a Contract on These Campaigns

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterGood lord. This one can’t end soon enough, and I’m tempted to say “badly enough’. There really should be penalties and pain for political campaigns as time and attention-sucking and uninvolving as the one we’re enduring right now.

I freely confess to jaded-induced boredom. I’ve seen too many campaigns. I really should slink away to the Yukon with a faithful dog, a store of hardtack and jerky and let this ceaseless barrage of boilerplate bluster and by-the-numbers attack advertising run its course, which of course would mean killing off the last critical synapses in the last sentient voter walking the land. When (or if) I re-emerged the world might resemble the aftermath of some zombie plague, with the brain-eaters being political consultants and messaging experts.

We all know it’s bad, as in dull, monotonous, predictable and off-putting. Need a fresh example? How about GOP Senate candidate Mike McFadden devoting one day to announcing his “contract with Minnesota” and then another day to signing it? Inspiring stuff. Imaginative, too. Another “contract”. The latest in a 20-plus year run of “contracts” thrown up by imagination-free political candidates who don’t dare, and/or are advised not to dare ever saying anything that might engage the mental machinery of what I refer to as the “actively informed voter.”

Obviously, if you’re one of those people you fully understand that these campaigns, which thanks to the epic flow of money unleashed by Citizens United never actually end any longer, are targeted on a sliver of the population that rarely exceeds 15%. These would be your “persuadable voters”, the folks who, put another way, mostly ignore political/government function, get a lot of their news from headlines they see walking past the few newspaper racks still remaining, overhear at the plant or see on some cable channel in the dentist’s office. That’s who all the money is being spent on. And who knows, a couple of them might even be persuaded to vote … against the other guy.

Meanwhile, it is worse than a Newton Minow “wasteland” for everyone else. If you care enough to follow these processes daily, instead of just for a couple weeks every other year, you’ve come to accept that there’s nothing here for you. You’ve heard every attack thousands of times, seen every grainy video of lock-stepping “ultra-liberals” and lapse into narcolepsy at the hint of yet another “debate”. Essentially you made your mind up months (if not years) ago and are enduring this siege of unrelenting blandness as you might a stand-up comic suitable for your mother’s nursing home.

Obviously, if this were Kentucky or even Iowa, or as Joe has been following, South Dakota, it might a little different. There’d at least be a pulse. But here in Minnesota there’s never been any serious doubt that either Al Franken or Mark Dayton was going to be reelected. If there was it vanished with the nominations of Mike McFadden and Jeff Johnson, two guys with all the inspirational ability of a couple corporate trainers who forgot their PowerPoint.

So what to do? Well nothing, if like Franken your handlers, advisers and kitchen cabinet have wrung every last ounce of wit and risk out of you. (Dayton will always and only do what Dayton wants to do.)

But in (my) ideal world here’s something I’d like some genuinely “courageous” candidate “fighting” for the middle-class and “hard working” Americans everywhere to give a try.

Screw these ritualized debates, which long ago degenerated into a trench warfare of pre-digested catch phrases and attack slogans hurled back and forth like mustard gas.

I’d like to see a (formerly) witty, daring guy like Franken agree to a serious of “thesis candidate” interviews with bona fide experts on a series of issues. Tell the League of Women Voters to go find three acknowledged experts each on economics, public ethics, communications, whatever and you’ll agree to sit, by yourself, not with your opponent, and be cross-examined by them for 90 minutes. No horse-race obsessed professional journalists allowed. Instead, a conversation rewarding actual brainpower, intellectual resourcefulness and humility.

To be revealed: What you do and don’t know about the reality of what you’re selling to the persuadables on primetime TV, in between episodes of “Honey Boo Boo” and Thursday Night Football.

Suicide for the fool who agrees to such a concept? I’m not so sure. If Franken agreed to do it, what’s the predicament for McFadden?

Bottom line question: Does any politician dare talk to adults like adults? I’ve decided the answer is “no.”

Hmmm … must check Expedia for packages to Whitehorse.

Affleck v. Maher. Traditional Liberal Meets 2.0

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterFinally, a debate both worth having and worth listening to.

And obviously I’m not talking about either the Governor or Senate “debates” here in Minnesota. Until they give awards for bland and stultifying the four main combatants in those fights will go unrewarded and ignored for their powers of inspiration. (See Joe’s post on that issue.)

But the face off between Bill Maher and actor Ben Affleck on Maher’s HBO show last weekend was a far .. far … more provocative beast. Week in and week out Maher’s panel is invariably the most compelling “debate” moment on TV, for the simple reason that unlike the DC talk shows, “Meet the Press”, etc., his cast of characters doesn’t include John McCain and glaze-inducing, market-tested “messaging” gets slapped down with unabashed glee. (Here’s a link to a Salon follow-up with Maher.)

The topic last weekend was the liberal misconception that being a liberal means being open and accepting of anyone’s beliefs, without skepticism or criticism. The fact that Affleck missed that point and leapt immediately to charges of racism is what made the moment so interesting. Liberal v. liberal. Hollywood traditional variety v. envelope-tearing.

Specifically, Maher and atheist author Sam Harris (“The End of Faith”, which I highly recommend), were arguing the point that while, yes, organized religion in general is not something they regard as, shall we say, an evolutionary advantage, Islam is a particular problem. Arguably the most conservative of all the world’s major religions, with exclusion, restriction and intolerance toward women, gays and non-believers baked (or widely misinterpreted) into its central tenets, Islam’s propensity to affirm violence currently compares with the worst excesses of Christianity, Judaism and whatever else, which for those up on The Inquisition, the Crusades and the routine invocations of God at every call to battle is really saying something.

Maher and Harris make the point that being a liberal means having a responsibility to identify and speak out against intolerance in whatever form it appears, even when it comes wrapped in the supposedly sacrosanct cloak of another person/culture’s “faith”, i.e. whatever they choose to believe. Affleck the Hollywood heavyweight, instinctively playing the mass audience card, lost barely a second conflating this argument with racism and white fear of inherently violent, gun-wielding blacks.

You can watch the interaction for yourself, but what is on display is very traditional liberal thinking (Affleck’s), where true liberals take a maternal attitude toward all cultures and beliefs, essentially on the grounds that it is antithetical to “liberal values” to making large scale criticisms of any culture (Islam being more culture than race, despite Affleck’s knee jerk inter-mingling with racial bigotry). Put another way, freedom of religion means that if they say they’re doing it because they believe it is the word of God who are we to disagree?

By contrast Maher and Harris are arguing, what for them at least, and I tend to agree, is a kind of Liberalism 2.0. An upgrade in both critical thinking and public courage that says today’s liberals, fully cognizant of science, evolution, modernity and an inter-connected planet, have a responsibility to call out intolerance wherever they see it, regardless of its time-honored, “divinely-ordained” trappings and self-righteousness.

I don’t hear either Maher or Harris arguing for some kind of secular jihad against Muslims. Far from it. Respite from the millennia of religion-sanctioned violence is their overall objective.

What they are saying is that if you are as committed to the full rights of women and minorities as you say you are, you seize opportunities to argue that suppressing those rights is never acceptable. As in anywhere by anyone, a professed religiosity be damned. This applies to cynical cultural/religious conservatives in the United States and no less cynical, self-serving mullahs abroad.

The ironic bind, which makes liberals of Affleck’s ilk jump the tracks, is that a call for a reasoned, sustained protest against religious-inspired intolerance sounds like a call for  … intolerance.

And that is part of what makes this debate so interesting and vital. It would do liberals a world of good to argue out this point.

Twenty Debates? Oh No, Mr. Bills!

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“Less is more,” minimalist designers tell us.  “The law of diminishing returns,” economists explain.

And so it goes with campaign debates.

Campaign debates serve a lot of important purposes for our democracy. They are a more efficient way to communicate with voters than door-knocking or pressing the flesh one clammy hand at a time.  They get candidates off-script, which captures rare moments of candor, humor, humanity, intelligence, stupidity and reality.  They cover more issues than ads, direct mail and other forms of political communications, which exposes candidates’ depth, or shallowness.

But clearly, there can be too much of a good thing.  In the 2010 gubernatorial campaign, Mark Dayton, Tom Horner, and Tom Emmer debated and debated, and debated some more.  They debated an eye-glazing 25 times.  Most of the debates ended up getting ignored by reporters, and just about everyone else, because they became complete and utter re-runs. I mean, even if you love Gilligan’s Island, and who amongst us does not,  the 25th time you see a re-run about Gilligan’s pedal powered bamboo car is significantly less riveting than the first 5 times.

As Washington University political scientist Steven Smith observed about the 2010 marathon debate-a-thon:

 “…there is a point of diminishing returns and I think in the Minnesota case we may have reached the point in the last month where there have been so many debates that the individual debates just don’t receive much attention.

Now in 2012, State Representative Kurt Bills wants to debate U.S. Senator Amy Kloubachar 20 times over about 90 days.  This desire likely has less to do with Bills‘ love of debates than it does with the fact that his campaign is broke and having a difficult time delivering his oddball Wellstonian-libertarian fusion messaging.

Though Kloubachar is a bright and skilled debater, her campaign strategists would prefer to keep the popular incumbent in highly controlled settings until Election Day, to preserve her large lead.  Therefore, so far they have agreed to two debates.  For context, former U.S. Senator Norm Coleman agreed to debate challenger Al Franken five times.

Somewhere between Kloubachar’s 2 and Bills’ 20 is a reasonable number.  I’d say the number is no higher than 10.

Here is my rationale:  Most of what is learned by undecided voters through debates is conveyed through news coverage.  After all, the people actually attending the debates, or monitoring them start-to-finish on TV or radio, are predominantly voters who made up their minds long ago.  So, when the news coverage stops, the debates pretty much stop yielding benefits for undecided voters.

Minnesota’s newsrooms continue to shrink dramatically, and are decreasingly willing to cover politics, particularly broadcast news outlets.   Given those unfortunate trends, I find it difficult to believe that the Minnesota’s press corps will give decent coverage to more than about 10 debates.

So, I’m all for debates.  And two is not enough.  But oh no, Mr. Bills, not 20.

– Loveland

 

Note:  This post also was featured as a “best of the best” on MinnPost’s Blog Cabin feature.