It looks like the Republican National Committee might be planning to “limit the number of debates and taking steps so that the forum is friendlier.”
I think making the presidential debate forum “friendlier” is a mistake. A “friendly” debate allows snake oil salesmen to make impossible promises to an audience that can’t know the details of public policy. A “friendly” format would have made it tougher for candidates to point out that Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan was a middle-class tax increase. A friendly format would have made it tougher to expose Newt Gingrich as a fraud who supported cap-and-trade, and a federal health insurance purchase mandate while taking money from Freddie Mac. It was the toughness of the debates that revealed Rick Perry’s weaknesses in the areas of federal policy and national public opinion dynamics. Isn’t it better that we figured all of this out in the Fall of 2011 rather than the Fall of 2012?
I think the pre-Iowa debating process should be three to four months of sustained scrutiny. At the beginning of the process, most of the voters will know next to nothing about most (if not all) of the candidates. It is easier for a hopelessly flawed candidate to gain a following in the early stages. Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain both got significant followings at points in 2011. Both did not have what it takes to go the distance, but if the process had been short enough, and they had gotten hot at the right time, they could have won some delegate selecting contests. Give the primary voters some credit. Given time and scrutiny, they will figure things out. You just have to give them the time.
One potential argument against multiple and tough primary debates is that it leaves candidates damaged or pushes them toward the party’s extremes. It doesn’t have to do any such thing. Obama wasn’t damaged by a lengthy campaign against Hillary Clinton and Clinton was far more politically formidable than anybody Romney faced in the 2012 Republican nominating contest. If Romney adopted a too-harsh tone on immigration and proposed a huge and unhelpful across-the-board income tax cut, it was because of flaws in Romney’s personality rather than flaws in the process. Pity the frontrunner who is a tone deaf opportunist. Pity the party where the tone deaf opportunist really is the best candidate. Just don’t blame the debates.
I would make one change if I could. the debate process starts a little too early. Running for president becomes a full time job almost immediately after the midterm election. This gives a major advantage to candidates who don’t have serious executive responsibility. Look at the 2012 Republican field. You had a bunch of ex-governors, an ex-Speaker of the House, an ex-Senator, a couple of backbench members of the House of Representatives (who I don’t think were especially well regarded among their peers), a former pizza executive, and Rick Perry (who was still a governor.) That is a lot of “formers.” If you have to spend the first half of 2015 working with an independent-minded state legislature, preparing for Spring presidential debates is going to be tough. We would probably be better off if the first debate was in mid-September and there were no phony events like the Ames Straw Poll before the debate. That still leaves four months of intense campaigning before Iowa.
Still, a lot of this is sour grapes. The single biggest reason why the Republicans had a lousy field in 2012 is that the best candidates chose not to run because of a combination of family circumstances (Mitch Daniels) and the electoral calendar (Louisiana having its elections for governor in 2011.) Even if the RNC changes nothing about the debate calendar, we are likely to have a much stronger Republican field in 2016.
February 7th, 2013 | 9:25 pm
“Obama wasn’t damaged by a lengthy campaign against Hillary Clinton and Clinton was far more politically formidable than anybody Romney faced in the 2012 Republican nominating contest.”
But the MSM who was moderating all of these debates were far more formidable for Romney than Obama, which is probably the most important problem with the debates, they were moderated by people who were not only completely clueless about what were relevant issues for Republicans but actually hostile to the point of setting up serves in the debates that the Obama campaign would then spike. Remember Stephanopolus’ mystifying question about contraceptives which turned out to be the match that ignited Obama’s whole Romney against women meme? The RNC would do better to be more deliberate about who moderates these debates.
I do think your right about the circus performer quality of many of the 2012 candidates. Part of the problem was the race for front position took on a whack-a-mole quality where someone who was literally invisible one week has a good couple of debates, makes it to the front position and turns out to be unable to credibly sustain his position once he receives sufficient attention. None of these people should have even made it past the first heat.
It seems to me one solution would be that if we’re going to be doing 20 debates why not have the debates between a subset of candidates which are rotated so that after a few debates everyone is represented, but also receive sufficient attention so we can learn things such as how Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan was rubish, so we wouldn’t have to go through the embarassment of learning about it far later than we should have?
I agree the debates aren’t the problem, I think the problem is how the debates are formatted and executed.
February 7th, 2013 | 11:31 pm
This is slightly off topic, but there’s some interesting news that has implications for the other POMOCON campaign 2012 discussions: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/02/07/cbo_is_increasingly_skeptical_about_obamacare_116951.html
A couple months back we batted around the question of whether the CBO made was making an impartial appraisal of the Ryan health care plan costs. The conclusion I came away from that discussion is that the estimations of the CBO and OMB really are different in kind, and one isn’t necessarily more impartial or partisan than the other.
However, this interesting article says that the CBO has now readjusted it’s estimate of how much Obamacare is going to cost… you guessed it, it’s going to cost a whole lot more than they estimated in August. According to the article, what’s different is that with the cliff deal made, the CBO has recalculated the number of people it expects to be on the insurance roll according to the new tax rates. I still don’t quite have a good sense of how the CBO is supposed to operate
February 8th, 2013 | 2:55 am
[...] It looks like the Republican National Committee might be planning to “limit the number of debates and taking steps so that the forum is friendlier.” I think making the presidential debate forum “friendlier” is a mistake. A “friendly” debate allows snake oil salesmen to make impossible promises to an audience that Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
February 8th, 2013 | 7:32 am
Look, we lost because we ran a candidate (by all accounts a very decent and generous man) many if not most of us came to support reluctantly and late in the game. (That probably says more about us than it does about him) No matter how much we tried to gin up enthusiasm deep inside we didn’t believe in him. Against a living monument of history (Obama the first member of a minority to take the high office), it was no contest.
Be that as it may, one has to wonder why Republicans and Conservative agree to show up for certain news programs and opinion shows when their own function seems to be to serve as the target for target practice.
February 8th, 2013 | 11:03 am
CJ, I built a post around your comment.
Pseudoplotinus, I like the idea of rotating the candidates so you don’t have each candidate talking for two minutes at a time twice an hour. I don’t think that the debate moderators were much of the problem. Don’t get me wrong, I wish you had Robert P. George out there sticking a knife in one of the frauds (like he did with Bachmann) in every debate. But it isn’t like the Fox News debates were THAT much more productive than the other debates (though they were somewhat better – minus Juan Williams feeding Newt Gingrich straight lines.) If the 2016 Republicans can’t handle Diane Sawyer, then we are all out of luck.
Mick, Romney seems like a personally generous guy, but I’m not sure that people were wrong to look at his public opportunism as being more relevant. We didn’t believe in him, but there is every reason to doubt that he believed anything he was saying. That wasn’t even his biggest weakness. You can be an opportunist and a keen sense of public opinion. Bill Clinton has that but Romney doesn’t. But Romney was a smart, hard working and disciplined guy who got the most of his ability.
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