From "Bodwell" comes this question…
You said you found much of the debate dull. In all seriousness, what would you have done to make it more interesting? And is the purpose of a debate to be entertaining?
Entertaining? Not necessarily. But I think they're interesting when they tell you things and show you sides of the participants you didn't know.
Each of these candidates — anyone who's likely to ever be in a Presidential Debate, certainly — has certain stock set pieces and mini-speeches they've developed to all the obvious questions. If you ask anyone running for President these days, "What should we do about Iraq?," they have a rote answer. We don't need a debate to let us hear that. We can hear it in any of their speeches or town hall meetings.
What I'd like to see in these debates is candidates who are knocked off their scripts. I'd like to see them asked questions for which they don't have well-honed replies. Or at least, if they do get to trot out their house numbers, have some sort of follow-up that challenges them to defend the leaps of fact and logic in those canned responses. My problem with Jim Lehrer's moderating the other night was that he kept saying it was "time to move on to the next topic" at moments when they seemed to be about to stray from the expected dialogues.
I'd like to see more of the kind of thing some people call "gotcha" questions. Reporters are afraid of them because they don't want to be criticized if and when one candidate embarrasses themselves. I don't think there are any unfair questions unless they're setting one candidate up to spike the ball on the other. Why not ask the candidates if they can briefly describe each of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights? Or name the leaders of a couple of foreign nations where the rulers' actions may affect U.S. security? The point is to ask questions where the candidate can't just parrot a rehearsed answer. I always think it's telling when a person who wants my vote doesn't know what the Minimum Wage is or what the average person pays for health insurance.
That yearning for the all-too-rare candid response is why I always liked Helen Thomas in presidential press conferences. I know Republicans hate her but she also asked blunt, uncomfortable questions of the Democratic chief execs she's covered. It's said that before Nixon went before the White House press, his aides would prepare a list of every possible question that could be asked and Nixon would prepare responses to each of them. Then Helen would always ask something that wasn't on the list. I'd like to see a debate in which most of the questions are unanticipated. That wouldn't mean avoiding the obvious pressing issues. It might mean asking about more specific aspects of them. Did Lehrer ask anything that the candidates' aides couldn't have expected?
Palin and Biden are going to get an unprecedented tune-in for a Battle of the Wanna-Be Veeps. They both have the reputation, deserved or not, of blurting out unpredictable things. It's not so much, I'd like to think, that viewers will be hoping for a live Bloopers show with someone saying something embarrassing. I think they just want to see candidates without scripts. McCain and Obama didn't have scripts or TelePrompters but they'd said some of those things so often, it didn't matter.