For decades, now, our presidential candidates have gotten on the stage with each other and dodged question after question by mocking the other guy's hair. What's the point? Why should we care? Shouldn't there be more incentive than chaple credit and bad pizza to watch what should be a deciding factor in who our nation's next leader will be?
My point is this: our debates need to change. I believe they should be strict in time, content, and topicality. At the amount of money spent on a presidential election, I would like to think we deserve more than a poor attempt at stand up preformed by old men.
What are your ideas for reforming our political debates? On a larger scale, what about our elections and the methods of communication within them?
As a former debater the presidential debates make me laugh; they aren't debates and never will be because the candidates make the rules and neither one wants to risk being destroyed on national television. To prevent that, the format consist of short speeches touching on each issue then their opponent "reubutling (sp?)" by pointing out one or two weaknesses then speaking about their side. Why not crush your opponents argument? Because thats mean. If your mean people don't like you and therefore wont vote for you. This helped Bush a lot because he's a genial guy. He is not aggressive in his speech and makes people feel comfortable. If a candidate was to come on the debate and make their opponent looks stupid, people would think, "wow he could do that to me." Personality wins elections not logic. Ross Perot in his bid for the presidency as an independent used charts, diagrams, and statistics to show why his plans were going to work better. Why don't candidates do this? Obama talked about how creating a green industry would create 3 million jobs. That is one of the very few stats we saw in the election. What got Obama elected? His personality, not his ideas.
ReplyDeleteAre we always forced to choose between personality and ideas. Pity the poor speaker who is warm, affable, and intelligent, and who had deliberated about the options available instead of taking an ideological position which guarantees his or her stance on the issues of the day. Has the media fostered this idea that if someone is suave as a persuader he or she is mouthing empty "rhetoric?" Does not having been the editor the Harvard Law Review indicate some degree of intelligence. One could just as easily point to someone like Charles Krauthammer on the right, who is very thoughtful and very personable and powerful in his physical presence. President Bush did not strike anyone as a gifted speaker. Neither did he strike many as a thoughtful one. He was, to use his own words, "the decider." History will judge his decisions, but, if his approval ratings were any indication of the confidence he inspired, one would have to conclude that he was neither a personality nor a persuader.
ReplyDeleteAll of this raises an interesting question for would be speakers: how does one convince an audience that he or she is deliberative and trustworthy, especially when we have become fairly cynical about political speechmaking?
The presidential debates just go to emphasize the key to politics: how to answer a question with no useful information whatsoever. The candidates both attempt to tie just enough of the original question into their speeches so as to give the illusion of answering it, but in reality they simply use each answer as a time for propagating their own propaganda. Furthermore, debates simply serve to further polarize issues. In America, the last thing we need is for people to become even more adamant about hating another belief simply because it is not theirs.
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