More Thoughts and Suggestions for Debates (posted 9/17/24)

After reading the comments on my column yesterday, I see that some CO-ers either think that Trump shouldn’t debate again because he’s winning without it, or because of the bad debate format he’d be stuck with. 

I hope that he’s winning, but I haven’t seen convincing evidence that he is winning by enough to overcome the margin of Democrat fraud.  And if there’s a straightforward way for him to widen his lead on her – which I argued yesterday he can very likely do in a second debate – I think it’s foolish to not take the fight to her.

Not to mention that it shows too little faith in Trump, and too much faith in Kamala, IMHO!  

Several of you also argued that Kamala will never agree to anything like a fair debate format.  I’ve got some suggestions about that below, but you may be right about that. 

But if so, it’s still a win/win for Trump to try to set up a second debate: he wins if he gets another chance to show the truth about Kamala in a debate, and he wins if he offers to debate and she runs away.

But even if none of my pragmatic reasons for a second debate have swayed you, I think there is an important philosophical reason that we should make the case for robust debates, and this applies to this election and future ones.

As much as people forget this, in a democratic republic, politicians are our employees.  Campaigns are a long series of job application tests, and debates are job interviews. 

Debates aren’t perfect, of course, and are a flawed mechanism to demonstrate who deserves our votes.  Often charisma can count for more than demonstrating a mastery of policy and the ability to govern, and too often both of those can be at least temporarily defeated by a near-sociopathic ability to shamelessly and convincingly lie.

But can you name a better mechanism? 

Stump speeches can be useful, but they’re canned and controlled, and usually not even written by the candidate.  Ads can be very effective, especially when they reinforce impressions that people already have about a candidate or policy, but they’re often even less honest than politicians!  Fundraising can gauge a candidate’s breadth and depth of support, but provides no direct evidence of his/her merit.

The closest option we have to a debate, in terms of preserving the Founders’ idea of legitimately informing voters, is a town hall.  And of course a town hall can be a format for a debate.  But it also suffers some of the weaknesses of debates, in that it is susceptible to using ringers in the audience to steer the proceedings.    

I’m glad that Trump has done a lot of town halls, but the issue is Kamala.  She hasn’t done any, and there’s no reason to believe that she will ever do one, unless it’s totally rigged in her favor.  Which brings me back to the importance of a second debate: it’s Trump’s best (and possibly only) chance to expose her truthfully to the American people.

The elephant in the room (if the Haitians haven’t eaten it yet) (I kid the Haitians!) is that our current system of debates sucks.

To fix our debate system – as with fixing anything that has become dysfunctional – we must first identify why and how it has gone wrong.  I see three main reasons:

1. Moderators have a self-interest in using their bias to favor their preferred candidates in the rules, and that’s exactly what they’ve been doing for the last several decades. 

2. Moderators have a self-interest in making themselves the center of attention. (When a Candy Crowley or David Muir type says something like, “I’m going to fact check you, because I don’t think you’re right about that,” or “I want to move on to another topic,” the only correct response is, “Who gives a damn what YOU think?”  And also, “Suck it, Trebek.”)      

3. Candidates have a self-interest in only debating if and when it helps them. 

The third reason presents a difficult challenge, but there are many ways to straightforwardly fix the first two, either by choosing the moderators objectively, or by minimizing the moderator’s role to near-invisibility.

Ben Shapiro cited an interesting Jewish model for choosing good judges/mediators of disputes: each side picks their own, and then those two choose a third. The resulting three-judge panel embodies the kind of checks and balances that our Founders initiated.

Other options could be to use a pair of moderators, one chosen by each side, or to schedule two debates, one format and location chosen by each of the participants.  But I would prefer the other choice: shrink the role of the moderator to a time-keeper and nothing else.

During my decades of teaching debate and argumentation, I saw that that can work just fine.  I learned that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, because we have existing, time-tested debate templates that we can adapt and tweak as necessary. 

There are various good models – going all the way back to the Greeks, and more recently being used in law schools, and in academic forensics competitions.  Uncle Aristotle – and two millenia of smart people after him – offered a good basic partition still used today, in which each competitor gets a chunk of time to do two basic things: “confirmation” (advancing your own argument) and “refutation” (addressing/refuting your opponent’s argument).   

Some models offer debaters the chance to choose the topics – sometimes by mutual pre-arrangement – while others offer a list of main topics to be covered, with time allotted for confirmation and refutation on each topic.  A block of time for a closing statement is almost universal. 

CO mentioned that he saw a talk by Douglas Murray last week, and I love that guy.  (Murray I mean, though I love CO too of course.  Because to know him is to love him.) Murray would have a black belt in debate, if there were such a thing.

Everybody in CO nation should look up the Munk debates – they’re held in Canada, of all places – and watch the one from June, in which Douglas Murray and Natasha Hausdorff took on Gideon Levy and the execrable Mehdi Hassan on the subject of anti-zionism vs. anti-semitism.  The twist to the Munk debates is that the audience votes for who they thought won the debate immediately afterwards.  (Murray and his partner stomped their opponents, winning 66-34.) 

Trigger warning: if you watch last Tuesday’s pathetic ABC debate and then immediately watch a substantive, enlightening Munk debate, you might get the bends.  (You may also notice that in the Munk debates, the moderator is invisible.)

While the moderator issue is easily solved, the candidate issue is trickier.  I think we should require our candidates to have at least 2 – preferably 3 – presidential debates, and 1 VP debate, as had been the practice since the late 80s, until 2020.  (The Commission on Presidential Debates, who ran that system, was biased and did a mediocre job, but that could be solved by the alternative ways to choose moderators listed above.)

The trend for the last two election cycles has been for candidates at every level to strategically refuse to debate when they thought it helped them, and I hate that trend.  I’ve discussed how I think our debate system needs reform, but I’m a conservative because I want to conserve the traditions that made this nation great, and one of those traditions for a self-governing republic is debate.

I was pissed in 2020 when the Dems ran a basement campaign for Biden, using covid as an excuse to hide him from the public as much as they could.  They obviously did so to lie about his policies and the shape he was in, but he did do two debates with Trump. 

When I found out in 2022 that dimwit AZ Dem governor Katie Hobbs was flat-out refusing to have even one debate with Kari Lake, I was disgusted.  The trend continued with Fetterman only agreeing to one debate with Dr. Oz, and that one so late that a ton of early voting had already been done.  The extent of Fetterman’s brain damage revealed in that debate illustrated the folly of exempting candidates from debating. 

I’m going to anger many always-Trumpers now.  You know that I’m all-in for him, and will be ecstatic if he wins and devastated if he loses (to the point that my wife is worried about me if Que Mala wins!).  But I hate that Trump refused to debate in the primaries.  The debate is a job interview, and I don’t think you should be considered for the job if you blow off the interview. 

I know: Trump had already had the job, so it wasn’t like he hadn’t been interviewed before.  And seeing the way his polls took off when the Dems started indicting him on BS charges, I’m sure that he would have mowed through DeSantis and the rest just like he did in 2016.  But I still wish he would have showed up and fought and won, rather than taking what felt like a negotiated forfeit.

In a Machiavellian sense, of course, Trump was smart to skip the debates.  So were Katie Hobbs and John Fetterman, and so was the Hidin’ Biden strategy in 2020.  They took the most self-serving path, and they won.

But there’s a reason that “Machiavellian” is not a compliment.  The diluted moral taint accompanying it often carries karmic payback.  If Biden had been smart, he would have refused to debate Trump this year, and he’d still be the candidate.  And if he hadn’t deteriorated so badly, there’s a reasonable chance he could have squeaked through again. 

We would all be howling about that, and for good reason. Trump would have been howling too, but with no justification.  How could he demand that Biden debate him – because the voters deserve it, or it’s not fair to duck a debate? – when he refused to debate in the primaries? 

Trump correctly calculated that he had nothing to gain by debating in the primaries, so he didn’t.  But if you defended that choice, you can’t complain if either Biden or Kamala had refused to debate Trump in the general. In fact, they had much more justification for that self-serving choice than Trump did!  He was a clear front-runner, and had showed he could defeat all comers in 2016, while Biden and Kamala are both fragile frauds, and likely to get their lyin’ arses whipped by him in a debate.    

Okay, now that I’ve enraged everyone (!), let me close by reassuring you all that I know that Trump’s flaws are tiny and his virtues gigantic, when compared to Que Mala and A-WOLz, and he has to win in November! 

But I hope he does decide to at least try to arrange a second debate, hopefully with a modified format, different moderator system, or etc.  I think JD is going to wipe the floor with Walz, and I know that Trump might well win without a second debate.  But I’ve got faith that he can crush and expose Kamala in a second round, and that doing so is his best path to opening up the kind of lead that all the leftist cheating in the world won’t be able to overcome in November!

And looking forward – after Trump begins his second term (please God!) in January – I hope we can start working hard to come up with a debate format and schedule to implement for future elections. 

Because giving up on the prospect of ever having fair and substantive debates again is the farthest thing from a bunch of hardy Ameri-cans being cautiously optimistic that I can think of!

Hamas delenda est!