When the Democrats hold their first debate next week, only the personal traits of the two main participants will prevent it from reaching the lows of the recent GOP debates.
The problem is the television news organizations that have staged the debates. Their news divisions are not in-depth information sources. By its very nature, TV is a superficial medium of quick sound bites with no time to explain or probe. The people hired to present the product reflect that.
In the Republican debates, the Fox and CNN anchors seeking quick 20-second video clips had an easy time of it because of the overpowering presence of Donald Trump. He is a creation of mass media. He shot from the hip to create sound bites and forced others to respond in kind, giving the networks the melodrama they sought.
The only strong moments directly addressing issues came when candidates stole the microphone to assert themselves and address them.
One came when Trump and Carly Fiorina got into a schoolyard shouting match over who had the worst business failures. Chris Christie grabbed the mic and told them both to shut up because the kitchen table issues affecting the average middle class bread-earner were more important to address than which of the two had a better personal business career.
The other strong moment was when Trump got into it with Jeb Bush over speaking Spanish. Bush stammered through a demand for an apology to his Mexican wife, with whom he speaks the language at home, but never could explain why he did interviews in the language.
Marco Rubio grabbed the microphone and turned it into a brilliant policy statement that Bush missed. He noted that he grew up learning Spanish from his grandfather. If a segment of voters chose to get their primary information in that language, he said, “better they hear it from me directly than to depend on the Univision interpreter.”
Try as they might, media won’t get a WWE knockdown from the Democrat debate. Hillary Clinton does not want to debate at all and will stick to stilted scripted answers to play it safe. Bernie Sanders is an ideological standard-bearer who would rather discuss arcane government process than tussle personally with Clinton.
The debate format is flawed. If they were true debates, the moderators should have been unnoticeable in the process. They should have asked issues questions and gone around the stage for each candidate to answer so that voters could compare and contrast their various approaches to governing.
Instead, the moderators took about 25 percent of the air time, and they zeroed-in with individualized gotcha questions. Were we watching a media interview program or an inter-candidate political debate?
Credit our friends north of the border for getting it right. The three major Canadian party leaders are holding debates leading up to the Oct. 19 parliamentary elections.
The moderator was Toronto Globe and Mail editor-in-chief David Walmsley, a traditional journalist instead of media celebrity. He would bring up an issue, phrase the question to all three and then sit back and let them interact.
I watched one event from Calgary online and learned more about the real thinking on substantive issues of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair and Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau (son of the former prime minister) than I have as a U.S. citizen about those who want to be my president.
What passed for personal attacks were not the nasty insults we’ve seen here. They were more on the order of colorful turns of phrase to make a point.
For instance, Mulcair attacked the prime minister’s over-reliance on the energy sector to bail Canada out of recession and remarked, “Mr. Harper put all of his eggs in one basket and then dropped the basket.”
When Trudeau described the NDP universal child care program as amounting to ineffective “puffs of smoke,” Mulcair, hinting at Trudeau’s support for marijuana decriminalization, merely replied wryly, “You know a little about that, don’t you?”
There were few moments like that. Cute sound bites were rare. The three political leaders were there to inform, not entertain.
We could return civility and depth into our own American political debates. The first step would be to return the formats to issues instead of personalities. And then assign real journalists rather than media egos to moderate.
Vic Berardelli is a retired political consultant and author of “The Politics Guy Campaign Tips – How to Win a Local Election.” Now an independent unenrolled registered voter, he a former Republican State Committeeman and former member of the National Board of the Republican Liberty Caucus.