MARC CHOQUETTE
Perspectives Editor
With all the boxing analogies thrown around in every “gloves off,” “fight to the death,” “rough and tumble,” “duke it out” presidential debate, it was Monday night’s Democratic “throwdown” that was closest to seeing some actual fisticuffs on stage.
Most of this was thanks to CNN’s free-for-all debate format hosted by the too-timid-to-moderate Wolf Blitzer, who couldn’t seem to interject all night or actually get control of the ugly, off-topic, back-and-forth exchanges between Sen. Hillary Clinton, D—N.Y., and Sen. Barack Obama, D—Ill.
“Dialogue” between the two got so bad, it often left viewers wondering if candidate John Edwards was actually in the Myrtle Beach, S.C., auditorium.
The debate’s format, announced by Blitzer at the introduction, called for eliminating time limits in favor of the “honor system.” You could see disaster coming. Limiting candidates to “roughly 1 and a half to 2 minutes” without explicitly calling “time!” is like leaving candy outside your doorstep on Halloween with a sign that says “only take one!”
While the open format provided for more substance in many cases, it also provided time for inter-candidate bickering, accusations, and the opportunity to steer the discussion completely off-topic with the goal of scoring some political points. It made for good television, but didn’t accomplish much more.
This theory proved correct when Hillary’s first answer — to a question regarding the economy — took a good 5-6 minutes, beginning with a completely unnecessary rephrasing of the question in the form of a statement.
When the same question was thrown to Edwards, his discussion of his economic plan quickly turned from honoring MLK to discussing how he’s qualified due to his identification with garbage workers in Memphis, causing Blitzer to chime in, saying, “What about the plan?”
As you can tell, things were not exactly going swimmingly after the first question with regard to honoring said “honor system.”
The rest of the debate seemed to devolve from differences in policy to overtly personal attacks and distortions, leading to an exchange so heated and so television-ready that you could see CNN execs sitting in Atlanta slapping each other with high-fives.
The exchange began when Clinton simplified Obama’s comments on former President Reagan to mean that Obama agreed with Republican policy for the last 15 years. She also equated funding the war while in the Senate to supporting the war, even though Obama clearly stated since 2002 he had been opposed to going to Iraq in the first place.
Obama hit back, saying his opposition has been no “fairy tale” as Bill Clinton had said. The accusations from the former led Obama to comment, “I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes.”
After hitting Obama with a charge that he worked for a slum landlord (Antoin Rezko) while at a law firm, Obama responded saying he had worked on the project for a grand total of 5 hours. He went on to note that he quit the law firm to work as a community organizer, saying, “While I was on the South Side, you were on the Board of Directors at Wal-Mart.”
The night was dominated by these kinds of exchanges, prompting Edwards to interject, “Is there not a third person in this debate?” The crowd erupted in favor of Edwards — clearly showing those in attendance were fed up with the Obama/Clinton back-and-forth.
Obama had to backpedal practically all night, getting sidetracked from the issues to answer to attacks. Nearly every response by Obama began with “The truth is…” or “What I said was…”
And this was only the first hour of the two-hour debate. Blitzer characterized the following hour after the lengthy commercial break, saying, “No rules roundtable next!” Of course, after the first hour’s bickering, this idea of “no rules” being taken even further emitted a huge groan from the audience.
While this open format invited some more substantive talk, hopefully the moderators of future debates will interject more often to focus the talk on policy and not personal attacks — especially ones that are unsubstantiated.
01-24-2008