Remember debate club in high school? In college? Remember reading about how debates are one of the cornerstones of democracy? Remember reading about the great Lincoln/Douglas debates? How about the Kennedy/Nixon debates, which Kennedy won because he was more telegenic than Nixon? Debates are where the candidates square off and answer hard questions, rebut each other's responses, and try to present the best argument on the issues at hand. Remember?
Tonight, President Bush and Presidential hopeful John Kerry will square off in the first of three televised debates. Normally, the prospect of a high-level political debate would get my pulse racing. I would anticipate the event with the same enthusiam as a baseball fan awaiting the start of the World Series. But for some reason, I just can't seem to build up much interest in this series of debates. Oh, I'll watch them - don't get me wrong. But I doubt I'll hear or see much that will interest me greatly. Maybe it's the absurdly large set of rules that the Republicans insisted on and the Democrats agreed to. Maybe it's the scripted nature of the debates, with all questions being known before hand and all answers being prepared in advance. Or maybe it's the subject; after all, the very idea of listening to these two metronomes droning on about foreign policy and homeland security torques my jaws.
First of all, we don't have a foreign policy. Period. Unless of course you mean invading a nearly defenseless dust-bowl and deposing its leader purely on a whim. Bush is going to get up on TV tonight and tell us that his coup d'etat in Iraq was an integral part of the war on terrorism and has made the world a safer place. What he won't talk about is the fact that Iraq - its military destroyed by the first Gulf War and its economy in shambles after a decade of economic sanctions - posed no threat whatsoever to America's security. What he won't talk about are the very real nuclear weapons programs being developed in North Korea and Iran, both rogue nations with a genuine axe to grind when it come to the U.S. And he's hardly likely to talk about the terrible human rights violations that are going on in so many African nations. These are situations that really do threaten our national security, but Bush hasn't taken drastic action against them, and he isn't likely to talk about them in the debates.
Nor is Kerry likely to mention them either. He, too, will stick to his scripted responses, simply re-iterating his theme that Bush flubbed both the War on Terrorism and the war in Iraq. He'll try to pound home his "W equals Wrong" theme without setting down any concrete ideas for how he would do things better. If we're lucky - real lucky - Kerry might actually solidify his positions - you know, explain that the world is a complicated place and that it requires a sophisticated leader who understands the subtle nuances of geopolitics, not some simple-minded bonehead who just plows forward without considering what the reverberations of his actions are going to be. But I doubt we'll hear anything like that from Kerry. It's too far off script.
This is the problem with a scripted debate. The audience - apparently hand-picked in advance - was required to submit all question in advance for vetting, and they are not allowed to ask the candidates any questions that might come to mind during the debate. Nor are the candidates allowed to ask each other questions. So if Bush makes some specious argument about how Saddam Hussein was in league with Osama bin Laden, Kerry is not allowed to ask him a follow-up question and neither are the audience members. This, of course, plays right into Bush's hands, considering his refusal to appear before anything but an audience of hand-picked supporters.
In the end, this won't be an open debate, where hard questions are asked and followed up on relentlessly. This will be little more than an extended political ad for the candidates. Rather than being forced to argue the issues and being judged on the quality of their arguments, Bush and Kerry will simply be speechifying, and what they will really be judged on is which one has the best team of speech writers.
This isn't democracy folks; it's the pale shadow of something we used to call democracy, and it leaves me hollow.
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