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The View From The Ground- 10/8/00
By Patrick J. Shanahan
Politics as a Spectator Sport
Something went terribly wrong in the 1960 Presidential election. Besides JFK winning I mean. Someone decided that it would be useful and innovative to have a televised "debate" between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. The event itself has become political legend – how the dashing and confident Kennedy triumphed over the swarthy and sweaty Nixon, how people listening on radio thought Nixon had won while those watching on television thought Kennedy had won. If that were the sum of its importance it would be properly relegated to a footnote in campaign history. But, alas, it was not to be. It was the start of a horrible, mind-numbing trend. The Presidential "Debate" has become an quadrennial ritual which now seems to have achieved the status of the single most newsworthy moment of the campaign season.
I believe that the very notion of a Presidential debate is worse than useless. It is a symbol of the low state to which modern American politics has sunk.
The first downside with debates might be called the "Slick Willy" syndrome. It is tailor made for those who specialize in style over substance, of demagogues and hacks. The camera transcends mere politicos into movie stars for-a-night. Poor Bob Dole, for example, had no chance against President Clinton. All Clinton had to do was stare into the camera with those puppy dog eyes, bite his lower lip, and it didn’t matter what words actually came out of his mouth. He could have threatened to ship all the old folks to Antarctica and he still would have been declared the debate’s "winner". We live in the age of celebrity, and televised debates positively reinforce this at the presidential level, tempting voters into a choosing based on likeability. The very criteria for judging "winners" is depressing: who made the "gaffes", who sighed the most, who looked good, who came across as "warm", who had the zippiest comebacks. While these are interesting facets of personality, they are a remarkably shallow basis on which to select a President. It is MTV politics.
Second, it is truly scary to think that a certain number of voters will tune into the debates, and on that basis alone decide for whom to vote. Even if the debates weren’t a temptation to demagoguery, they are a temptation to ignorance. Whereas in the past the blissfully ignorant would cruise right through election day without even knowing it had come, now they watch two hours of TV, and on that basis alone decide who ought to be President. To amplify one of my basic rules of politics, if you need to watch the debates to understand what the candidates stand for and whom to vote for, don’t watch them, and don’t vote! One could make the reasonable argument that in Lincoln & Douglas’ day, debates served a legitimate purpose of spreading information in an information hostile environment – they were one of the few means of spreading ideas and persuading voters. In the electronic age they have been rendered utterly irrelevant.
Third and most importantly, debates feed into and reinforce the horrible trend we see of treating politics as if it were a spectator sport. The media, with television in the lead, treats the Presidential "race" as exactly that. When is the last time you saw a report detailing the candidates’ positions, evaluating them for truthfulness, attempting to understand the likely impacts of their policies? The media have become obsessed with the race itself, who is winning and who is down, what strategies are being employed, who has made errors, and how. Watching Hardball is just like watching Monday Night Football (except that Doris Kearns Goodwin is much funnier than Dennis Miller). This attitude of politics as a game reaches fever pitch with the debates. They are treated as playoff games, with extensive pre-game analysis and post-game commentary. "Gee Chris, just when it looked like Gore would get bogged down in his strategy of excessive detail, he ran the old race card play and made a huge gain." Just listen to the commentary. It is loaded with sports analogies. This attitude of politics as a spectator sport is the result of bored "insiders" chatting among themselves. They already know who stands for what, the only question they are left with is who will win. I’m not sure what bothers me the most: the fact that the media don’t realize (or don’t care) that the majority of their audience need to hear and read substance about the candidates, or that the audience seems to eat up the shallow game show nature of the coverage.
When the next election cycle comes, I am tempted to chuck ideology over the fence and vote for the first candidate who refuses to set foot on the debate podium. It will be a rare display of character and good sense.