My last words on the YouTube Debate

Though there are many of them …

First of all, I hope that we have real debates in the future — when people talk, go back and forth, and are allowed time. You know, like debates?

Newt Gingrich has called for a return to Lincoln-Douglas style debates, and I think he’s right. These mass-forums don’t serve the public well because:

- The “moderators” choose which questions to ask which candidates. The only good forum-style debate that I’ve ever seen, I think, was the Values Voter Debate, in which each candidate got the same amount of time to answer each question. John Cox and Alan Keyes had as much time to make their case as Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul, which was as much time as Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney would have had, if they’d bothered to go.

- The format and staging are designed to highlight the candidates who are already polling well. This gives them more airtime, thus helping them get their message out, thus helping them raise more money, thus helping them poll better, and making them the focus of the forums. There is no serious effort toward informing voters.

- Since there is no real follow up, the only deep conversations happen when two candidates bicker with each other … and those are usually not so much deep as heated and (maybe) entertaining. The Romney-Giuliani and Romney-Huckabee exchanges are great examples. Very poor. There was depth in the Huckabee-Paul back-and-forth in the Durham, NH debate, but that’s the rare exception.

- Stupid questions do exist, contrary to the popular slogan. They include:

“Do you believe every word of this book? And I mean specifically, this book?” (I wonder how many people noticed that his was a King James Bible … it wasn’t just a shot at Romney, whose book collection would also include the Book of Mormon, but might have also been a shot at people not of the KJV-only mold)

“What does the Confederate flag mean to you?”

“Would you punish women for having abortions?” (Does no one know their history? That has never been the law in this country …)

“What kind of gun do you own?”

These are stupid questions. They don’t belong in a serious debate, because they are based on faulty premises.

It’s also disgusting that there were virtually no questions about Iraq, education, health care, terrorism, surveillance, or the actually-relevant issues.