Clinton Challenges Obama to Lincoln-Douglas Style Debate

Democratic rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton turned up the rhetoric Saturday in their increasingly heated primary battle as she issued a new debate challenge and he complained of a race that's largely been reduced to trivia while working families feel economic pain. Clinton took the debate dispute to a new level, challenging Obama to face off with her in a debate without a moderator, Lincoln-Douglas style.

"Just the two of us, going for 90 minutes, asking and answering questions, we'll set whatever rules seem fair," Clinton said while campaigning in South Bend.
Her campaign made the offer formal with a letter to the Obama campaign. Obama aides said they were studying the letter.

The more open style of debating where each side presents an argument gets its name from the famed debates that took place during the 1858 U.S. Senate race in Illinois between Republican Abraham Lincoln and Democrat Stephen Douglas. Trailing in delegates and the popular vote, Clinton has been stepping up the pressure on Obama for more debates in advance of primaries on May 6 in Indiana and North Carolina. Clinton argued that Obama won't debate because he's unhappy with questions from moderators during the April 16 debate just before the Pennsylvania primary. After that debate, Obama complained it focused too much on political trivia and too little on real issues.

On the campaign trail Saturday, he sounded much the same theme.
"I was convinced that the American people were tired of the politics that's all about tearing each other down. The American people were tired of spin and PR, they wanted straight talk and honesty from their elected officials," Obama said at a town hall meeting in the aging industrial city of Anderson.

It does sound awfully harsh, doesn’t it?

On the other hand, I highly doubt that Hillary Clinton could manage the intense scrutiny of actually having to lay out her plan in a speech for an entire hour.

She doesn’t have that much material.

She gives speeches, but they are punctuated with lots of “non-speech” time, lots of “don’t you agree with me, folks?”, and ‘audience participation’.

Talking for an hour like Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Douglas did requires the ability to think and plan, two things Hillary Clinton is lacking, if the way she’s run her campaign is any indication.

Hillary Clinton doesn’t actually have any of her own ideas or know anything about anything. She doesn’t have to. She has speech writers.

But they don’t sit on the stage with you, so they can’t write your rebuttal for you. She’s have to do that herself, and she is almost surely incapable of doing so.

Which is why a Lincoln-Douglas Debate of either type I mentioned earlier is not going to happen. Because even the Forensics type, with a 6-3-7-3-4-6-3 format has more “blocked” minutes than more televised debates and requires instant, fairly long rebuttals from people who know what they are debating about.

It’ll never happen.

They may debate again, but it won’t be LD. Though, if I were Obama, I’d tell her that the race is settled and the time to debate is over. He gains nothing from debating her, she has nothing to lose.

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