Rally outside Democratic presidential debate, July 2019
When the first Democratic Party presidential debates had 20 or more participants last year, many viewers found the format unwieldy and unworkable. The candidates never had enough time to answer the questions, and constantly were cut off. While one candidate was giving an answer, one or more other candidates were raising or waving their hands to try to be called upon for a response. The moderators were too intrusive. It was all very distracting, and sometimes provided heat but very little light. Plenty of folks said, just wait until we have fewer candidates, then the problem will be solved.
Well, last night, the Democrats held another presidential debate, moderated by and aired on CNN, with only six candidates, and it was another disaster. Despite the modest number of participants, each candidate had only 75 seconds to answer questions, 45 seconds for rebuttals and 15 seconds for clarifications. That turns our serious policy issues into an A.D.D.-style “lightning round,” and bears no relation to what presidents actually do in the Oval Office (or on the golf course, as is the case with Donald Trump). As happened before, the moderators kept cutting off the candidates, and some of them, like Amy Klobuchar, kept talking anyway, which was quite annoying. Others, such as Joe Biden, stopped talking in mid-sentence to conform to the debate guidelines, robbing viewers of the ability to hear their full responses. While one candidate was responding, others raised and waived their hands to get the moderators’ attention. And as always, the moderators purposely tried to gin up disagreements that might make for good TV drama, as if our policy debates are just reality shows.
At this point, it’s obvious that the problem isn’t the number of candidates on stage, but rather, the televised presidential primary debate format itself. While it’s probably too late to make changes to the debates this year, next time around, the parties and the candidates should demand one of two things: They can change the rules to require longer allotted response times, meaning that, for a debate lasting the same amount of time, there would be fewer questions asked. Of course, CNN and the other TV networks would probably object to such a change, because they no doubt think that viewers have the attention span of a frightened squirrel.
The alternative would be to ditch these primary debates altogether, and stick with town halls. These are long form discussions where the candidates appear one at a time on stage with a moderator for approximately one hour, are asked questions from the moderator and often directly from audience members, and are given the freedom to form complete answers. The Democratic presidential town halls we saw last year, such as this first one with Elizabeth Warren in March, were very educational and very revealing, even making for great television.
Let’s make the necessary changes to hear full answers from the candidates, before voters get so turned off that they tune out of our policy debates completely.
Photo by Becker1999 (Paul and Cathy), used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/lxqgrD
