Presidential Debates Could Be Much More Imaginative

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/opinion/presidential-debate-alternatives.html

Version 0 of 1.

The candidate debates have become such a fixture of presidential elections in the United States that it’s easy to imagine them as inevitable and unchangeable components of our democratic process. But as we examine our democratic traditions in this fraught campaign cycle, we should take a step back and consider whether, in this age of online quizzes, audience-voted competition shows and Reddit AMAs, we could find better ways to figure out which politicians we want to vote for.

In theory, debates are supposed to help us distinguish among presidential candidates. There is some expectation that, forced to respond immediately to questions and pushed into adversarial situations, the candidates will reveal something more about themselves or their policies than they do in prepared speeches, taped spots or tweets. In this idealization, a debate should allow different viewpoints not only to be heard but also to challenge one another.

Unfortunately, today’s debates rarely accomplish that — they are run as spectacles, curated more for television ratings than for any benefit to democracy. The debates stud our presidential elections like commas in a run-on sentence, punctuating without full stops. Every month or so, we are treated to a ramping up of excitement, breathless speculation and predictions, and a selection of customized graphics that swoop onto television screens. Then, during the debates, candidates are given extremely short response times (75 seconds!) and questions designed to elicit controversial responses and clickbait sound bites. The events themselves are almost immediately overwritten by successive layers of spin and punditry — in real-time on Twitter, immediately post-debate on television and online, the next morning in print and later in the polls.

The paradox is that the value of debates comes from that very condition of spectacle. In this era of the attention economy, an event, however manufactured, is one of the few ways to ensure any kind of collective focus. The scarcity of camera time to be divided among the candidates increases the value of that time. It has also led to one of the more persistent and baffling metrics to come out of these debates, as media sites and pundits obsessively measure and rank the minutes each candidate has spoken. (Is it a good thing to talk a lot, because you’re dominating the conversation? A bad thing, because you’re dominating the conversation? Or entirely the fault of the presumably biased moderators?)

With many millions of dollars traded for the privileges of hosting the debates and advertising during them, the point becomes more about making the audience available to corporations than about making the candidates available to the audience. The debates are, in part, advertisements for the medium. The moderators are almost always journalists from the channel or outlet hosting the debate, and not, for example, constitutional lawyers, or presidential historians, or economists, or tax policy experts, or foreign policy academics or climate scientists. Why not have a debate moderated by a panel of governors and mayors, or former congressional aides, or soldiers or data privacy activists?

It’s true that we occasionally do get seemingly unscripted moments in presidential debates. But those moments reveal, at best, candidates’ capacity to think on their feet, not in a moment of national crisis, but on television under high-powered lights, a live audience and time limits. It’s not an entirely irrelevant skill for a chief executive, but it’s also not the only one we should be testing. What about the need to read and absorb a great deal of information quickly and make decisions about it? Or manage a staff of experts? Or communicate diplomatically with foreign leaders? Imagine a series of debates in which each candidate, surrounded by a handful of chosen staff members, competed to prepare and persuade us of a policy proposal based on a surprise scenario rolled out by the moderators, a kind of “The Great British Baking Show” for politics. Or a briefing book challenge, ranking candidates by their executive summaries after 15 minutes of on-camera skimming.

There are so many possible solutions to the problems that plague today’s debates. They could be hosted and managed by organizations that are not in the profit business (hello, C-Span). We could remove the video component of debates, using still photos or nothing at all, to remove the attention to clothes (especially those of female candidates), hairstyles, shakes and sweats. We could make the debates boring, allowing candidates to drone on and on. Alternatively, we could ensure that all existing information about their platforms and proposals is readily available online, by mail or to watch at an earlier time, and allow only talks that add something new to the discussion.

Part of the problem is that we haven’t really decided what we’re looking for in a president, a position that combines head of state with chief executive. We are interested in certain kinds of personality or character traits while disclaiming the importance of others. We claim to want managerial competence, but evidence of that rarely makes it into any part of a campaign. We might care about their policy choices, but it’s hard for most laypeople to gauge how successful a candidate is likely to be at instituting those policies in our complicated government structure. We want candidates who are polished and media-ready, but also distrust them, worrying that they’ve been through too many focus groups and consultants to show us their real selves.

Televised debates thrive in this gray area, playing off the celebrity aura of candidates and sensationalizing superficial flaws while getting virtue points for participating in the democratic process. They pretend they are doing a civic service, while pivoting the process entirely to their own interests — something that could be said about many of the actors in our political ecosystem. And they’re staggeringly unimaginative about how they do it. Our world is full of dazzling potential for effectively communicating information; we should be harnessing some of it for our elections.

Malka Older (@m_older) is an affiliated research fellow with the Center for the Sociology of Organizations at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. She is the author of “The Centenal Cycle” trilogy and the short story collection “ … and Other Disasters.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.