There's a question that won't be asked in Tuesday night's Democratic presidential "debate" — it's never asked — but we'd all be better served should the moderator offer it up. If and when the stage gets small enough, the same challenge could be tossed to the Republican candidates. The question I have in mind is, in a sense, the only one that matters — a question that helps us figure out whether each aspirant wants to be leader of a party or president of a country.
I'll get to that pivotal question in a moment. First, let me deal with the other thing that's probably irking you: the reason I put the word "debate" in quotation marks.
Presidential debates are an excellent idea. But we don't have them. What we have is a ridiculous stage show, in which reporters come up with questions and the time limits make it impossible for anybody to give a serious answer. Candidates have no opportunity to persuade us; all they can do is rattle off canned paragraphs of varying vacuity.
I've argued before that serious candidates should boycott the debates. I believe it still. An actual debate would allow the speakers to try to explain their positions on complex issues. In my experience, our most divisive issues tend to divide precisely because they're difficult. But the time limits under contemporary rules don't allow candidates to treat difficult questions with the seriousness they deserve. Instead, they are able at best to impress us with their glibness.
Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, in their 1858 debates, were able to hold the stage for an hour apiece — not counting the half-hour left for rebuttal. Okay, those days are gone forever. But the current format basically allows the candidates a choice between tossing red meat to the base, offering their vacuous verities or committing gaffes. And it's only those gaffes (or what devoid of context sounds like a gaffe) that voters who don't watch the entire debate will likely ever see.
Maybe the debates don't matter. Just in case they do, however, we should at least treat presidential elections with the solemnity granted to high school debates, where a speaker typically has eight minutes to defend a position. Nowadays, we'd likely dismiss as long-winded a candidate who needed that long. Such is the parlous process through which we select the leader of the executive department of the most powerful nation on earth.
It's unlikely that the changes reflect a difference in the quality of the electorate. There is little evidence that 19th- century voters were more politically sophisticated than today's. Some critics tie the short length of answers to the polarization of the electorate — particularly in primaries — although even if the critics are right, it's hard to tell cause from effect.
More than 20 years ago, the columnist Mary McGrory suggested that the problem was not the debaters but the questioners — a criticism that has often been repeated since. Moderating a debate, she wrote, brought out "a lamentable tendency on the part of reporters to bask in the klieg lights, to ham, to preen while 60 million ordinary people look on." She suggested getting the candidates "into a room together," without a moderator. (She didn't say whether there would be an audience.)
