D'Bate

I missed the first 15 minutes or so of last night's Democratic debate, and I spent most of the time getting my laptop back up to speed after getting a new hard drive, so I wasn't paying close attention. But I couldn't miss what Matt Yglesias described in this post:

As ever, it's really striking to observe the difference between the audience-generated questions and the journalist-generated questions. Wolf Blitzer's main interest is in asking questions designed to put Democrats on the wrong side of public opinion, even if those questions are about things like driver's licenses or "merit pay" for teachers that aren't really under federal purview. Efforts to reframe those questions by putting those topics in the larger context of immigration policy more generally or education more generally are derided as cowardly dodges. The point, after all, is to force a choice -- piss off an interest group, or say something that could be used in a GOP attack ad.

The real people, by contrast, ask about problems in their lives. The mother of an individual ready reserve member wants to know about Iran policy. The mother of an active duty soldier wants to know about military pay versus pay for military contractors. An Arab-American wants to know about racial profiling. Then the candidates explain what they think about these issues.

The voters are curious and want to learn where the candidates stand. Blitzer doesn't care about informing the public about the issues -- he actually objects when candidates try to explain their views on broad immigration policy issues -- he's just interested in trying to embarrass the candidates.

The YouTube debate wasn't a good solution to this, because the moderator still picked what questions to highlight. There honestly shouldn't be moderators at all. They're just a bunch of windbags who are interested in getting pats on the backs from their colleagues. How about a topic statement goes out, a candidate gets to answer it for a minute (strictly enforced with a buzzer), and then a rebuttal. It would only be skin-deep, but it'd be a hell of a lot better than we're getting.

The constant horse-race focus that dominates the traditional media is trailing over into these debates. There's an assumed familiarity with the issues so there's no need to delve deeper. Gotcha questions serve some purpose in terms of dealing with pressure, but that's a meta debate. Folks want a real one. The candidates have to spend too much time telling Leslie Blitzer or Punpkinhead Russert why their question misses the point instead of explaining their position.

UPDATE: Yeah, sitting James Carville on the post-debate panel is completely out of order, too. The guy has appeared in Hillary Clinton's email pitches. He's a partisan operative, and his "opinion" that Hillary won the debate without context is completely irresponsible.