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A Plan to Save the Debates

November 14, 2015 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

By Llewellyn King

It’s time to fix the presidential candidate debates. If they aren’t fixed, they’ll become as irrelevant as the president’s Saturday radio addresses. These don’t fall on deaf ears so much as they fall on no ears.

The debates, structured as they are at present, somewhere between “Jeopardy” and the National Spelling Bee, don’t cut it.

We all deserve to look at our best at times, and to be judged by our best opinions and ideas. But the present debate format shows every candidate at their worst; fumbling to recall names, tripping over facts half-remembered and looking, well, absolutely anything but presidential.

If the purpose of the debates is to gauge the worth of the candidates’ policies, the way we are doing it is hopeless, favoring (if these extended press conferences favor anyone) the candidate who can summon up the most loved political clichés. For the Democrats, protecting granny from being thrown under the bus; and for the Republicans, the de rigeur attack on the size of government.

None of it is enlightening; none of it answers the real questions of’ statesmanship or illustrates the mental agility and even cunning of the candidate – qualities that serve well in crisis.

The key to my debate fix is borrowed from the hugely popular Prime Minister’s Question Time in the British House of Commons.

Ever wondered how the prime minister can know the state of road repairs in Peebles in the Scottish Borders, and equally what the government is doing to protect British nurses in Bahrain? He isn’t the great Oz. He knows the question in advance, but not the follow-ups or the interjections. This leads to good answers (or at least plausible ones) and real repartee, as the two parties go at each other.

Now I can hear the howls, the shrieks, the hyena-like noises that will come from my colleagues in journalism, as they’re asked to commit the sin of submitting a question. But we’d get real answers. And those answers would lay the candidate open to penetrating follow-ups like these:

“What makes you think that the economy can grow, despite the best efforts of other presidents?”

“Are you proposing a return to the gold standard, and all the trouble with that?”

“How are you going to arrest 11 million people?”

“Are you going to survive stories of deportees being sent stateless out to sea?”

“Do you know that more illegal immigrants are coming here by plane than by foot across the Southern Border?”

“Why, to begin with, did you feel your e-mails should be exempt from the way of doing things observed by other secretaries of state — one rule for them and another for you?”

“If you want the government out of our lives, why do you want it in the most private of situations, when a woman is with her gynecologist?”

The follow-up questions would reveal who the candidates are far more than gotcha questions to people who cannot be prepared for every policy that a president might encounter in four years in office.

This formula would still allow for the spontaneous bon mots that every candidate hopes will lift him or her to verbal Valhalla, like Ronald Reagan’s near immortal “There you go again.”

After that first question, there would be cut-and-thrust, give-and-take, but solid positions would’ve been laid down, parameters established, such as how the candidate’s tax cut would be paid for, or why the Department of Defense, so at home with cost overruns, would do a better job with military and civilian nuclear wastes than the Department of Energy, a recurrent theme every election cycle.

If the candidates felt more comfortable on the major questions of their campaigns, they’d give better debate. — For InsideSources.com

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: 2016 presidential candidate debates, Prime Minister's Question Time

In Congress, Party Loyalty Trumps Conscience

February 11, 2010 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

 

All those people who treat politics like baseball may have to start again. All those statistics about what happened in off years down through our history, all those references to recurring political phenomena, like the impact of the weather on elections, are null and void.

What’s changed?

We’re moving from government as we have known it — a system of two parties modulated by bipartisanship on many issues, where factors other than ideology matter to members of Congress — to a new order in which party loyalty trumps conscience.

Congress is acting more like a parliament than a congress. People who have been clamoring for a Congress more like the British Parliament, with features like “Prime Minister’s Question Time,” have got more than they wanted. They’ve got something like the British party system, and it is not a step forward.

While watching the Brits go at it on C-SPAN is good sport, and certainly tests the mental acuity and verbal dexterity of the players, it is an inflexible way of governing.

Despite the jolly repartee and the openness of discussion, the House of Commons can be a sterile place. The individual member feels impotent and frustrated. Unless a member loves constituency work with a passion, they can feel very unloved by the parliamentary legislative process.

The former Conservative M.P. Matthew Parris has written brilliantly about the impotence of the backbenchers in his autobiography. He abandoned elective politics for journalism, where he felt he could be more effective in shaping public policy.

The dirty little secret about Britain in particular, and parliaments modeled on Westminster in general, is that they aren’t kind to mavericks and are institutionally structured to keep them down or out. Private consciences cannot be aired easily, if at all. A cri de coeur may have to be embedded in a question on an aside in a debate late at night. It won’t be reflected in a vote when “the whips are on” — party discipline in force. The rare exception is a free vote of the House of Commons on a matter like the death penalty.

Here in the U.S., despite the emasculation that goes with party discipline, the Republicans are well down that road. And one wonders, can the Democrats be far behind?

The dynamic across the aisle is becoming asymmetric, and the only Democratic response will have to be a closing of ranks. Something unique to the American system is being lost here.

The genius of Congress is its ability to hear minority voices and, on occasion, for the administration to make common cause with the opposition — as President Clinton did with the Republicans to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement.

But the Republicans have given up one the great freedoms of our system of government. They have sacrificed on the altar of discipline the special freedom to vote as you see fit.

Sadly the move to party authoritarianism hasn’t come from within the party — although Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, and House Republican Leader John Boehner, of Ohio, are enjoying it — but from the forces that are shaping conservatism from without.

First among these forces is right-wing broadcasting. It’s a vicious and relentless goad to Republicans to move ever further to right, to embrace positions not of their own making.

Then there’s the party rump, characterized by the Tea Party movement. It’s implacably at odds not just with the administration of Barack Obama but with the times we live in. It yearns for another America in another time. It doesn’t want to face the cultural, demographic and political realities of today. But it’s in tune with the conservative broadcasting colossus, and it will have a large and negative affect on the Republican Party.

Arcing across the political sky, compounding all of this, is the phosphorous rocket of Sarah Palin. The former governor of Alaska may be in the 10th minute of her 15 minutes of fame, but for now she’s a bigger force in Republicanism than are its wiser leaders.

All of this has forced the Republicans in the Senate, and to a lesser extent in the House, to look more like the opposition in a parliament than the minority in Congress. Significantly, we’ve always favored “minority” to describe the other party rather than “opposition.” These words have described the uniqueness of Congress — its authenticity, if you will.

At least until history took a new course in 2010. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: British Parliament, Prime Minister's Question Time, Tea Party movement, U.S.Congress

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