Did everyone see the Palin/Biden debate!? Who do you think won? Palin held her own did she not? And that Biden, he’s made of the same stuff presidents are made of, don’t ya think? As for what I think, well, I don’t give a shit. I think it sucked. It was trite, boring, rehearsed, platitudinous, oblique, uninformative, pointless, and basically a waste of time that I could have otherwise spent making funny faces in my mirror.
So what I’m getting at in my I’m-to-cool-for-politics (but not too-cool-for-making-funny-faces-in-my-mirror) sort of way is that there is a big a problem somewhere because the presidential debates are overwhelmingly unhelpful[1]. Now I don’t know if everyone agrees with me, so I’ll make an argument and you can take it or leave it I guess (but I’m right, so you’d be better off taking it), and my argument consists of two major conjectures: (1) The debates are unhelpful, and (2) the problem is the questions the candidates are asked.
Now let’s not kid ourselves into thinking any candidate is or has ever been more than a politician; it is both the fact-of-the-matter and the necessary condition, and no matter how swept away by a candidate you are, how new or groundbreaking their strategies might be, there are just some facts of the world, you might even call them “laws,” that cannot be transgressed, and one of them is that in a democracy you are elected into office, and to be elected you must please more people than any real person could please. And so as a politician (and this increases in importance the higher the office) you must also be an actor. You must act away your flaws and uncertainties[2] and you must rehearse A LOT. You have speechwriters (i.e. scriptwriters) who try to write you lines for all possible contingencies. And they don’t try to write informative lines necessarily, but lines that offend the fewest, lines that are quotable and lines that are deleteriously accessible (meaning that by making something more accessible you trade accuracy and full-pictureness). Where else but in politics do you hear people try and characterize themselves so much? Imagine having a friend who wouldn’t shut up about what a maverick he was; you’d think he was an idiot and you definitely wouldn’t think he was a maverick. That’s why politics is more like a movie than some sort of massive social relationship: politicians create a character for themselves and impose it on the public, whereas in true social relationships it is the public who characterizes the person in question (or at least there is more of an interplay).
Now this essay is not intended to be a criticism of politics; it is a criticism of the media. So this previous paragraph, as much as it might have seemed like a jeremiad, was (or I intended it to be, at any rate) actually just a canvassing of the less inspiring side of the hard-facts of our political system. And it is important because these hard facts, rather than being a thing to complain about, should be a thing to surpass; so the responsibility lies on us or the media. The fact is that, assuming much of what politicians do campaigning is rehearsed, it should be a major goal to cut to the core or sift through the acting. After all, what these politicians do in office, that isn’t acting. That is where the shit stops. There the decisions are real. There a decision isn’t good if it is made with a smile; it is good if the resultant outcome is good. So really we should be striving to find out what the politicians would do when it matters.
But this is no easy task. These guys are good. When you talk about the executive branch, you’re talking about some of the best rehearsed people in the world. Passivity is not going to cut it here. So let’s talk debates because a prez/vp debate is, in theory, the forum most conducive to extemporaneity. Allow me to assert the following as a premise: the prez/vp debates, as we have seen so far, have consisted almost entirely of the aforementioned “acting.[3]” And who can blame the candidates? The line they have to walk is very fine, and if they have the opportunity to prepare and if that makes it easier for them to walk that line, well then why not? But listening to these rehearsed answers and talking points is not helpful to the American people, especially in this day in age.
Why is it not helpful? Well for one thing, all the rehearsed lines are not original and so probably appear in multiple media. These are lines about specific policies and philosophies of the candidates. “Change” “Drill baby drill” etc.. The point is, we’ve all seen it on television a hundred times or read it in the paper. Not only that, but the candidates take on various issues are now very accessible thanks to the WWW. It is not helpful to hear candidates say the same thing they’ve been saying over and over again. How does that help us learn more about the candidate and how does it really help us learn how qualified someone is to be prez/vp? After all, things like economics, social issues like abortion, health care, etc. etc… I might be mistaken but isn’t most of that stuff more like legislative branchy? Yes the president has veto power, and they do appoint SCJs, but in reality many of the decisions the president makes (and these decisions, unlike passing various laws, fall squarely on the shoulders of the president) are more leadership-type decisions (e.g. what to do immediately after a plane smashes into a big building). My beef is that these abilities – which seem very relevant to the presidency – never, or rarely, are brought up or drawn out from the candidate before he enters office.
But how do we draw it out? What we should do is ask better questions at the presidential debates. Ask questions not about the policies; ask what presidents would do in novel, high-pressure situations. By doing this we can cut through the acting; we can get to the core of the matter; we can find out if the candidates have what it takes, if they can think on their feet, if they can make important decisions quickly and wisely even if they are not prepared for them. As it stands now, the candidates prepare for everything they are going to say, but one of the skills most important to be president is to deal with stuff you’re not prepared for; to deal with stuff that has not cleanly been divided into left and right yet, or stuff that cuts across party lines. We know how these guys stand on this issue or that, but how will they be able to deal? I feel like that is such a crucial question, and more than that it is something that the debates can reveal. But they (teh debates) don’t! They don’t reveal shit. And why? Because of the dumb questions the candidates are asked. I feel like the candidates, before the debate, slip the moderators a twenty and say, “go easy on me,” because that is exactly what is being done. The moderators are going easy on them. You know what, if these people are going to be president they have to deal with some hard shit. Really hard. Stuff I would never want to deal with.[4] We shouldn’t go easy on them or give them a break because the world won’t.
So the questions that I suggest we ask are hypothetical-situation type questions. Stuff like: “if there is a nuclear bomb detonated in the US what are the first three things you would do?” Presumably the candidates do not have prepared answers to these types of questions. They can’t; there are too many of them. And so to answer these questions the candidates need to exercise their on the fly judgment – something that I think would be good for the public to see. Also, these type of questions can be unrelated to any relevant policy, and so the candidates would not be able to give one of those tangential non-answers. I mean imagine if someone had asked something like this to W. before he entered office: “If terrorists unleash a huge attack on the USA what is the first thing you do.” Now if in answering this question he sat there dumbfounded, scratching his head for 7 minutes because nobody had prepared him, then maybe people would have been a little wiser in choosing a leader because they would be more informed about his abilities.
So why aren’t the candidates asked these sorts of questions? Well, I suppose many people think that the issues and policies are just overwhelmingly important. But, again, passing laws is only loosely related to the executive branch, and so the candidates take on the issues does not reveal if someone has what it takes to be p/vp. Another reason these questions aren’t asked might be because, despite repetition, some people might not have a chance to hear the candidates defend their views except for the debates. Well…maybe. It seems a little strange that people would use the debates as their sole source of information on the candidate’s views. But because that might be the case I’ll say this: the debate should be a mix of hypothetical-type and issue-type questions and that way people can be informed about the whole package.
I will leave off with three questions that get my point across. I haven’t taken the time to think too long[5] and hard about these, so let me say there are certainly better/smarter/more revealing questions out there. It might be good if the people who wrote the questions were former presidential advisors, so they know what kind of impromptu decision making goes on in the White House on a day to day basis. So take these as sort of boiler-plate hypotheticals. These are the types of questions that should be asked (not the quality of):
(1) Suppose intelligence came in that a small terrorist group got a hold of a nuclear bomb, but the reports are unclear on how where or when. What actions would you take? Be specific.
(2) An all-out war breaks out between India and Pakistan. What responsibilities does the United States have and what actions do we take?
(3) Scientists discover that global warming is occurring at a rate faster than expected. It is widely acknowledged that if nothing is done the US will be under water w/in twenty years. How do you deal with this?
[1] Let me make it clear why “unhelpful” is the crucial adjective here. The purpose of these debates, as I think would be universally acknowledged, is to help people decide on who is most fit to be president. If this is the major purpose of the debates, it follows that being “unhelpful” would be the worst thing a debate could be. Now granted, people may watch it to support a candidate, to hurl invectives at their TV, or even a twisted few to be entertained, but these must be ancillary purposes otherwise the debate breaks down into nothing more than a macrocosmic episode of Survivor.
[2] Some people might subsume “uncertainty” under “flaws” but I think that is bogus. It pains me that, in the bizarre world of politics, uncertainty has become such a pejorative. The reason why is clearly because it is conflated with abulia, when there is no necessary connection between the two. There is a correlation, perhaps, but w/o a necessary connection why can’t we separate and isolate the two conditions, and find an answer to the real important thing: can a politician make a wise decision about issue X when he needs to, even though he is openly uncertain of the consequences?
[3] I’m asserting this as a premise because developing an argument for it would be nearly impossible. When you’re talking about nuanced behavior that suggests “acting” vs. genuineness, we’re talking about a sense or intuition more than anything concrete. Sure we can cite the fact that they are “stiff” or “mechanical” but in truth these adjectives are not only debatable themselves (e.g. I say candidate X is stiff, you say he’s not – then we’ve reached an impasse) but are relatively ineffectual argument-wise since they can be explained by many other things (e.g. nervousness, personality, having been on the trail too long). In truth our sense of genuineness is gestalt. So until the glorious day when EEGs are strapped to candidates heads at the debates, we will have to just defend premises like the one in question citing our intuitions. And if you disagree with me, then, well…there’s nothing I can do.
[4] If for some bizarre reason I ever do decide to become president, make it known here that I don’t really mean what I just said. (That is a not very funny joke).
[5] Blogging leads to lazy writing.
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