Richard Bernstein: Past holds lessons for future of presidential debates
[Richard Bernstein writes for the International Herald Tribune.]
How's this for an idea? Rather than continuing to have presidential-election debates in the current quick-and-shallow one-upmanship format currently being used, let's revert to the mother of all great political debates in America, those between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, which took place during the race for the U.S. Senate in Illinois 150 years ago.
As in the Lincoln-Douglas affair, the first speaker would have an hour to present his views; the second would rebut in an hour and a half, whereupon the first speaker would be given the floor again for half an hour to rebut the rebuttal. There would be no moderator.
The truth is, of course, that in the age of television, debates like those of the Lincoln-Douglas era would probably eliminate most of the audience. Who in America is going to sit for three hours while the candidates make long speeches?
And, by the way, if we wanted to be scrupulously exact in resurrecting the past, the audience wouldn't sit through the speeches. They would stand.
We not only had longer attention spans in the good old days; we were a lot hardier then, too, even if some of the ideas we had (the Lincoln-Douglas debates were about slavery, after all) were pretty retrograde.
Still, there's something to be said for turning back the clock when it comes to political debates, an idea that actually has occurred to some of the candidates in the current election. Last April, before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed what she called a "Lincoln-Douglas style" debate with Barack Obama, one with no moderator, just a direct exchange between the two candidates. Obama turned it down.
In June, however, with the Democratic nomination seeming within certain reach, Obama himself proposed that he and John McCain have a debate that, as Obama's campaign manager put it, "more closely resembles the historic debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas." This time it was McCain who showed no enthusiasm, perhaps because in the original Lincoln-Douglas contest, it was the Republican candidate, Lincoln, who lost the ensuing election.
"Anytime you hear a candidate in American politics propose a Lincoln-Douglas style debate, you know they're losing," was the rather jaundiced comment of one blogger, Andrew Malcolm, who was writing on The Los Angeles Times Web site.
The appeal is to a certain high-mindedness, an effort to acquire the mantle of high seriousness even as everybody knows that real Lincoln-Douglas style debates just wouldn't wash anymore.
And that's too bad. I always read the sample questions that experts propose to newspapers, like the excellent ones on the economy suggested for Obama and McCain, but then, given the one-to-two minute time slots available to each candidate to answer questions, it's not surprising that these questions are never answered.
In the days of Lincoln and Douglas, the question was whether slavery should be allowed into the territories of Kansas and Nebraska as they prepared for statehood, and the questions did get an ample hearing.
Indeed, it was in the debates and in his other speeches on the subject that Lincoln, who provided his standing-up audiences with detailed histories of preceding actions and arguments on the question, first articulated his eloquent antislavery position.
Douglas was in favor of what he called popular sovereignty, meaning that it was a matter of right for the people of a territory (though the white people only) to decide if they wanted slavery or not. Lincoln (who, like Douglas, believed that blacks were inferior to whites but was nonetheless genuinely repelled by slavery) said that no person had the right to ownership over another, and that, while nothing could be done to end slavery in the existing slave states, it was a matter of urgent moral importance that it not spread anyplace else.
It happens that last week's vice-presidential debate fell on the anniversary of the first Lincoln-Douglas debate, and, seizing on that coincidence, the Colorado Center for Public Humanities at the University of Colorado Denver last week held a re-enactment of the earlier contest.
The exercise, in which professional actors played the roles of Lincoln and Douglas, was in part to demonstrate how much the political discourse in America has changed over the years, and, according to participants, the earlier method held up pretty well...
Read entire article at International Herald Tribune
How's this for an idea? Rather than continuing to have presidential-election debates in the current quick-and-shallow one-upmanship format currently being used, let's revert to the mother of all great political debates in America, those between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, which took place during the race for the U.S. Senate in Illinois 150 years ago.
As in the Lincoln-Douglas affair, the first speaker would have an hour to present his views; the second would rebut in an hour and a half, whereupon the first speaker would be given the floor again for half an hour to rebut the rebuttal. There would be no moderator.
The truth is, of course, that in the age of television, debates like those of the Lincoln-Douglas era would probably eliminate most of the audience. Who in America is going to sit for three hours while the candidates make long speeches?
And, by the way, if we wanted to be scrupulously exact in resurrecting the past, the audience wouldn't sit through the speeches. They would stand.
We not only had longer attention spans in the good old days; we were a lot hardier then, too, even if some of the ideas we had (the Lincoln-Douglas debates were about slavery, after all) were pretty retrograde.
Still, there's something to be said for turning back the clock when it comes to political debates, an idea that actually has occurred to some of the candidates in the current election. Last April, before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed what she called a "Lincoln-Douglas style" debate with Barack Obama, one with no moderator, just a direct exchange between the two candidates. Obama turned it down.
In June, however, with the Democratic nomination seeming within certain reach, Obama himself proposed that he and John McCain have a debate that, as Obama's campaign manager put it, "more closely resembles the historic debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas." This time it was McCain who showed no enthusiasm, perhaps because in the original Lincoln-Douglas contest, it was the Republican candidate, Lincoln, who lost the ensuing election.
"Anytime you hear a candidate in American politics propose a Lincoln-Douglas style debate, you know they're losing," was the rather jaundiced comment of one blogger, Andrew Malcolm, who was writing on The Los Angeles Times Web site.
The appeal is to a certain high-mindedness, an effort to acquire the mantle of high seriousness even as everybody knows that real Lincoln-Douglas style debates just wouldn't wash anymore.
And that's too bad. I always read the sample questions that experts propose to newspapers, like the excellent ones on the economy suggested for Obama and McCain, but then, given the one-to-two minute time slots available to each candidate to answer questions, it's not surprising that these questions are never answered.
In the days of Lincoln and Douglas, the question was whether slavery should be allowed into the territories of Kansas and Nebraska as they prepared for statehood, and the questions did get an ample hearing.
Indeed, it was in the debates and in his other speeches on the subject that Lincoln, who provided his standing-up audiences with detailed histories of preceding actions and arguments on the question, first articulated his eloquent antislavery position.
Douglas was in favor of what he called popular sovereignty, meaning that it was a matter of right for the people of a territory (though the white people only) to decide if they wanted slavery or not. Lincoln (who, like Douglas, believed that blacks were inferior to whites but was nonetheless genuinely repelled by slavery) said that no person had the right to ownership over another, and that, while nothing could be done to end slavery in the existing slave states, it was a matter of urgent moral importance that it not spread anyplace else.
It happens that last week's vice-presidential debate fell on the anniversary of the first Lincoln-Douglas debate, and, seizing on that coincidence, the Colorado Center for Public Humanities at the University of Colorado Denver last week held a re-enactment of the earlier contest.
The exercise, in which professional actors played the roles of Lincoln and Douglas, was in part to demonstrate how much the political discourse in America has changed over the years, and, according to participants, the earlier method held up pretty well...