The first Presidential debate airs a week from tonight. Are you excited? Woo-hoo!
Actually, I bet you are excited, because the debates promise to be the biggest remaining events—barring October Surprises—in a close and closely followed election.
But do you expect to learn much from the debates? I doubt it, because the debates as they’ve evolved are designed to elicit little more than 30- to 60-second excerpts from stump speeches. And while they can be tremendously influential, it tends to be for the wrong reasons: someone sighs, flubs a line, looks at his watch, sweats too much.
Yes, you can rationalize all you want that these moments “reveal character,” but often as not they really just reveal the candidate doing something that plays into an already-established narrative. As it is, debates don’t really test much more than how well a candidate does in debates. (If that. You could argue that the experience of candidates like Al Gore or Richard Nixon—who “won” the debates on radio—shows that Americans don’t like overly good debaters.)
How could we fix this? Maybe our Presidential debates should be a little more like Project Runway.
I joke, but just a little. One thing that makes competition shows like Runway or Top Chef compelling is that they realize the best way to test someone’s ability to do a job is to get them to do it, not to talk about it. They’re about applying knowledge, not regurgitating it. Whereas a Presidential debate is like a job interview—a tepid one, with time-delimited answers—an episode of Project Runway is like a job tryout.
Now obviously no one’s going to get Barack Obama and John McCain to plan a restaurant menu together or design an outfit out of corn husks. But in a general sense, what if the debates focused more on hypothetical scenario-playing? Not hypotheticals like “Would you want the death penalty if your wife was raped and murdered?”—debates focus too much on how candidates feel rather than what they would do—but how they would handle, say, a military conflict between China and Taiwan, or allocate resources in an overwhelming bioterror attack, or respond to the collapse of a major investment bank (OK, scratch that last one). In the end, after all, Presidents succeed or fail not just on what they know but on how well they apply it.
Candidates, of course, are trained well to respond that they can’t answer hypotheticals. And there’s good reason for that: responding to a surprise hypothetical provides an actual test of how well a candidate can think on his or her feet and what stores of knowledge he or she has to draw on. That’s risky, and candidates—unless they’re desperately behind—will generally agree to debate formats that carry as little risk as possible.
The TV networks, for whom the debates are huge branding events, have little choice but to play along. But shouldn’t Jim Lehrer be able to elicit at least as much information about a candidate’s future job performance as Heidi Klum?