President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden face off in Cleveland, Ohio for the first 2020 presidential debate.
Photo Credit: Associated Press
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If you haven’t heard by now, Republicans have gotten their dander up over how presidential debates are run, railing they’re blatantly unfair, such as their chief argument that most of the panelists are composed of beltway eastern elite liberals out to make the Grand Old Party look foolish in front of a nationwide television audience.
White House correspondent for The New York Times, Maggie Haberman, was the first to report that the Republican National Committee (RNC) recently notified the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) that it plans to require GOP presidential nominees not to attend debates run by the commission going forward.
Haberman did tweet out, however, that “none of this is binding—a nominee can do what they want, and the nominee controls the party. But unlike previous cycles, there is far more energy among GOP base behind it.”
"The RNC will initiate the process of amending the Rules of the Republican Party at our upcoming Winter Meeting to prohibit future Republican nominees from participating in CPD-sponsored debates," Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel wrote in a letter.
The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) was founded in 1987 under the joint sponsorship of the Democratic and Republican political parties in the United States. It has hosted general-election debates since 1988.
So, what exactly troubles the Republicans about the debates?
Former President Donald Trump has been one of the most vocal ring leaders in charging the debates are biased, anti-Trump, and saturated with liberal leaning panelists.
In 2020, Trump tweeted that the commission is “stacked with Trump Haters & Never Trumpers.”
On another occasion, Trump complained about the selection of moderators of the debate, especially Steve Scully of C-SPAN (no longer with the network), who consulted with former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci on how best to question Trump. What made it worse for Scully was that when the meeting was first reported, he lied about it. He ended up backing out of hosting the debate.
Trump additionally complained that former Fox News anchor Chris Wallace and the NBC News reporter Kristen Welker were biased against him.
Trump and other Republicans pushed to have the debates held earlier in the election cycle, but that request was roundly rejected by the CPD. Also rejected by the commission was having nonvoting representatives of either the RNC or the Democratic National Committee at the commission’s board meetings.
It’s worth noting that Republicans are still fuming that CNN’s debate moderator, Candy Crowley, (no longer with the network), corrected Mitt Romney during his town hall debate with President Obama in 2012. Her interruption of the Republican nominee was taken by many Republicans as displaying flagrant favoritism with the president.
Many contend that the reason Republicans are leery of debates is that we are now living in an age of instant fact-checkers. On a number of occasions, some Republican candidates have made outlandish charges, only to have their statements thrown back at them as ridiculous falsehoods.
Eugene Mazo, a nationally recognized scholar of election law at Seton Hall University doesn’t think there's any bias, but does think the CPD is a problematic organization. “It is privately run, and it has come under criticism in the past of all sorts.”
Norman Ornstein, an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), thinks two things are going on with the Republican complaints. “The whole idea here is victimhood-- make your base feel like you are being oppressed and discriminated against, and they will turn out in anger” “So the elites running the debate commission,” from the Republicans perspective, “have stacked the deck against us, and we are not going to take it anymore. And second, they don't really want to debate, at least it if is fair in any way.”
Whether the Republican charges of bias has merit or not, I think it’s time for a major change in the selection of debate panelists.
I suggest a panel consisting of people like Bill Gates, Peyton Manning, Keechant Sewell (Chief of Police of NYC) and other prominent newsmakers. There's no reason why they can't meet with fact checkers and researchers, like journalists do, to make sure they're asking the right questions and be prepared for follow up questions. The panelists can flesh out their questions with each other by meeting, via Zoom, for a couple of weeks leading up to the debate.
Why should journalists be removed as debate panelists?
Not through any fault of their own, many times a small cluster of journalists during their long careers have had some working relationship with candidates. Steve Scully, for example, former C-SPAN anchor, was an intern for Joe Biden when he was in the Senate in 1978.
George Stephanopoulos, currently co-anchor on Good Morning America (GMA), was Bill Clinton’s communications director during the 1992 presidential campaign. He was also an active Democratic advisor before landing at ABC.
In 2015, it was reported that the then ABC News chief anchor, made three contributions to the Clinton Foundation, which was seen by many as a conflict of interest with his duties as a journalist. This revelation came before he was scheduled to moderate a debate among Republican presidential contenders in February, 2016. After the admission caused such an uproar, Stephanopoulos withdrew from moderating the debate.
Another compelling argument for removing journalists as debate panelists stems from the notion that most questions asked at these debates are mere “food fight” questions, asked to spark malice among the candidates instead of focusing on policy driven questions, questions that undecided voters hope to help them better understand issues facing them in their own lives. Networks, after all, are in a ratings war; the more questions they ask that will spark conflict, the more viewers they’ll generate. These short combative exchanges by the candidates make nice sound bites for the Twitter pages, but do little to resolve challenging issues facing the country.
A Pew Research survey, for example, reported that in 2016, only 10% of voters said they had conclusively made up their minds “during or just after” the presidential debates.
Many argue that the style of the debates too often resembles a “joint press conference” rather than a serious debate. Critics additionally charge that the panelists take too much time away from the candidates themselves.
Still others contend journalists tend to focus on the negative features of a particular candidate rather than zero in on a fundamental policy issue. Again, focusing on the negative, will most likely generate a ratings bonanza.
In 1992, the commission introduced a town hall format in which candidates are asked questions by undecided voters. Though this was a fine idea to hear the concerns of the average voter, the questions too often are softball questions, which the candidates spin by transitioning to their partisan viewpoint.
Having panelists comprised of prominent members of the country like Bill Gates (with his well-known climate change concerns) or Keechant Sewell (Chief of Police of NYC) asking how candidates hope to deal with police profiling or gun shootings within major cities, would go a long way in addressing some of the major concerns facing the country. The “food fight” questions would significantly be removed from the equation.
The United States has evolved in many ways over the last ten to twenty years.
Abraham Lincoln once said “as our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”
So too with presidential debates. I think it’s time for journalists to pass the baton and remove themselves from the debate forum.
Just a thought!
--Bill Lucey
January 15, 2022
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