In the 2008 election, history books will record, age and experience defeated youth and change. I am speaking, of course, about the choice of moderators for the Presidential debates—Tom Brokaw, Jim Lehrer and Bob Schieffer—who are collectively nearly as old as America (and incidentally as white as Mount Rushmore). As Rachel Sklar notes, this means that each debate will have John McCain and Barack Obama grilled by one of McCain’s demographic cohort. (PBS’s Gwen Ifill, meanwhile, gets to preside over the kids’ table at the Vice Presidential debate, perhaps because yet another old white guy would simply be too embarrassing in the possible event that the two candidates were a woman and a minority.)
I don’t think that the lineup means the debates will be skewed against Obama, at least necessarily. Content-wise, we’ve seen that a younger moderator (like George Stephanopoulos) can be just as tough on him; visually, the contrast is as likely to accentuate his vitality as it is to make him look like a kid playing grown-up.
The disservice is more to the voters themselves. Brokaw, Lehrer and Schieffer are all eminently qualified, of course, but so are, say David Gregory, Katie Couric or Lara Logan. As much as media critics like me focus on racial and gender diversity, this is one election where, demonstrably, age has been nearly the most determinative factor in predicting how someone will vote. If this election shows a divide running right about down the age 50 line, why take all the moderators from one side of it?
The one plus in all this for the networks: the debate commission managed to pick a lineup that actually makes the network-news anchor lineup look like a wellspring of exciting new blood.