The president is both head of state (the role in other polities of a king or premier) and head of government (the role of prime minister in a parlimentary system). The powers of incumbency work strongly to the advantage of the head of government seeking reelection, but there is something creepy about seeing the head of state stooping to debate a challenger, especially if things get at all personal.Indeed that is IMHO why it was, in times past, considered gauche for a presidential candidate to campaign at all. Shameless x42 is of course a special case, but incumbency seems to work to the president's disadvantage during debates. And in the "traditional" case of "objective journalist" moderated debates, the Republican has the additional burden of finessing the fact that he is alone with not one but as many as 5 Democrats assaying to position his challenger as the reasonable centrist and himself as a "right wing extremist."
Consequently even Reagan had trouble in the first debate with Mondale in 1984, and GHW Bush looked at his watch in 1992. I suspect that there were no debates when Nixon ran as an incumbent in 1972, and that only Reagan and x42 were reelected after submitting to debates. Certainly the debates of 1980 were critically helpful in turning the election against Carter, as those of 1976 were disasterous to Ford.
If you wanted to produce the most light you would stick with vice presidential debates, and would conduct them on the radio where it would be possible to run them for three hours at a time, and multiple times. They would be moderated only by a chess-timer controling the microphones to equalize the speaking time of the two contenders, and no notes or other aids--even aides--would be barred; even recorded sound bites would be permitted provided that they were sourced, valid, and in context.
The role of "objective journalist" to moderate the debates is presumptuous in the extreme since it positions the journalist above the country's most distinguished officials. Perhaps the most effective way to fend off journalism's demand for a role "refereeing" the contest would be a sarcastic proposal that the ideal neutral moderator might be Walter
Cronkite.Journalists' liberal bias: Why it matters, how it hurts TownHall.com ^ | 9/04/03 | larry Elder
Walter Cronkite, once called America's most trusted man, once disagreed with me when I called most journalists "liberal." "If by liberal," he told me, "you mean open-minded, then, yes. This is true."Cronkite, no longer constrained by the journalistic creed of non-partisanship, now writes a weekly column. About liberal reporters, he now pleads guilty: "I believe that most of us reporters are liberal, but not because we consciously have chosen that particular color in the political spectrum. More likely it is because most of us served our journalistic apprenticeships as reporters covering the seamier sides of our cities -- the crimes, the tenement fires, the homeless and the hungry, the underclothed and undereducated."
Last week, I interviewed Mr. Cronkite and questioned him about his rationale behind journalists' liberalism. If, I asked, journalists become liberal because they see the underbelly, the downtrodden, the miscast, how do you explain the conservatism of police officers, who, after all, see exactly the same things? Cronkite, apparently uncomfortable with the question, simply said, "Why should I?"
The staff decision by the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) opens the way for the show to book two of the sexier candidates for California governor: Hollywood he-man Arnold Schwarzenegger (news) and porn-star Mary Carey.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.In other words, the Federal Government is not allowed to control your opinion, or your expression of it. If you want to buy a press--you probably have a printer hooked to your computer--and publish a newspaper you do not apply to the government for a license which the government is forbidden to require. Whether or not I or anyone else thinks you are "operating in the public interest."
The FCC--disposing governmental powers--was created to determine what use of electromagnetic spectrum is "in the public interest." It decided that you aren't allowed to transmit on almost any frequency, but that certain of its favored elite are awarded a title of nobility called a broadcast license--and everyone else is entitled to shut up and listen.
Your "right to know" is beautiful clothing for the presumption of the objectivity of journalism. But if I disagree with you, one or the other of us is wrong--and if we both have a right to talk, no one has the right to hear only the truth.
Even people who buy ink by the barrel are deterred at the prospect of arguing with other people who buy ink by the barrel. Thus the true nature of journalism is not truth but consensus; what you are told--on the Internet or in print or on the air--may be the truth, or simply an urban ledgend which somehow flatters the teller of it.
Nothing the FCC does would be constitutional if applied to print or to in-person speech. Everything the FCC does should therefore be subject to "strict scrutiny" of the courts.
The "objectivity" of journalism is a naked emperor, and the FCC should be sued and forced to bring its tendentious licensees under control. As interested as you may be in the results of voting on election day, for example, it is not in the interest of the proper conduct of elections that government-licensed broadcasters put their--and thus the government's--imprimatur on guesses or even factual truth about how other people have voted.
There is time enough, when the responsible officials have made their tallies, to report the facts after the polls are closed nationwide. Had that rule been followed on Election Day 2000 we would have known the result a month sooner than was in fact the case.