Slate.com lists some of the obvious suggestions, which try to inject greater intellectual content. I would prefer to see the following:
1. Allow all candidates to watch a short debate of experts — with a fraud or two thrown in — and ask them to evaluate what they just heard and why they reached the conclusion they did.
2. Test candidates for the ability to spot liars.
3. Give each candidate a substantive message and then give each two minutes to turn it into pure fluff. This tests communications skills, plus we can see the meat grinder in action.
4. Require each candidate to conduct an orchestra. Watch to what extent each candidate defers to the players, and to what extent he prefers "panache."
Your ideas?
I don’t think 4 will work. It will only tell you which candidate is better liked by orchestras. There’s a reason there are few women conductors, you know, and it isn’t that they lack skill.
1 is the way to go. Wow, that would be something. Arguably, the single most useful strength of a politician would be his/her ability to figure out who the experts are. It would also make great TV. The only trouble is how to get TV producers to figure out who the real experts are…
I’d prefer to see real-time, user-generated content as an adjunct to the “top-down” information being presented by the candidates.
So, something like this: while the debate is going on, a side panel on the TV screen shows things that have “bubbled up to the top” on the debate website, due to online real-time voting (something like “Digg”). These could be:
counterpoints to debater talking points,
the most requested follow-up questions (which moderators could use at their discretion),
informational nuggets featuring hyperlinks to pertinent websites. (could be expert sites, or something else)
Basically, if there are millions of people watching the debate, allow those people to *help* the moderators cut through the fog, and allow people to directly affect, and determine the terms of, the debate.
Now, this is a corruptible system, and conceivably it is prone to cranks, like the call-in CSPAN or NPR shows. But the voting system should alleviate the problem of individual cranks. Coordinated corruption from the audience is another matter, but even if a bunch of Edwards supporters pushed through a bunch of their questions, it wouldn’t be great but it wouldn’t be worse than the top-down corrupt BS we are currently served.
No debate. No audience. A series of, say, one-hour interviews with individual candidates facing tough questioners – perhaps a panel of three – who challenge the sound bites.
The debates as curently conducted are pretty useless as wys to address policy questions, because there is no mechanism to get the candidates off their scripted messages and force them to address actual issues.
On the other hand, I’m not convinced anyone would watch.
The best liar detectors are liars themselves, so paradoxically that would be a black mark. A savvy liar knows this, and would lie about his estimation of who is lying, making the entire signal noise.
DK is on the right track. But I wouldn’t let them out at the end of the summer. Call it a public safety measure.
I don’t think you can have a meaningful debate with as many players on the stage as we have been seeing in the pre-pre-primaries, no matter how you organise it.
Once it comes down to the 2 or 3 front runners, and the same when the parties have nominated their candidates, the debates need to be run by an experienced moderator, with no time limit on the debate itself and no “2 minutes plus 1 minute for rebuttal” nonsense. This kind of oversimplification and soundbite politics have resulted in a dumbing down of the process across the developed world.
The candidates’ policies need to be scrutinised by independent Nobel winners in each of the key areas and the candidate’s individual competence in those areas need to be fairly evaluated and defended. “Gee, I’d like to have a beer with that guy” is no basis for a system of government.
The process should take as long as it takes and the candidates should also be psychometrically screened in the way any senior management appointment in the private sector is screened.
Or have I just been watching too many West Wing re-runs?
We should run it like American Idol or Survivor. As well, we should be able to sue any political candidate for false advertising once he/she doesn’t deliver on campaign promises.
Multiple choice issue Q&A prior to the debate:
Force the candidates to commit to a firm answer on key issues. Begin the debate with a multiple choice Q&A on key issues designed by a broad spectrum of political viewpoints. Include centrist options in the choice set to allow for “degrees” of opinion.
The moderators can cite the multiple choice answers in their questions during the debate without the need to dig up an obscure off the cuff remarks from an interview in 1994.
Canned answers will avoid the irritating redirection and spin like “I think the real issue here is…” and diluting qualifiers. Subsequent debate will be based on position commitment.
Hey- you asked for suggestions, no sense being realistic with my expectations.
I take issue with the assumption that only a Republican and Democrat get to be invited to the presidential debates, with only one exception (Perot) since the beginning of televised debates.
New Jersey has interesting guidelines for its gubernatorial debates: any candidate who raises a minimum amount of money gets included — about $300,000 if I remember correctly, though perhaps it should be higher in order to weed out candidates who won’t have enough funds to mount a real campaign. (The candidate also receives other “major party” privileges as a result.)
For a presidential debate, perhaps the threshold should be a minimum of $50 million in contributions — an amount enough to show that he can campaign with the two major parties. If a candidate shows in some material way that he’s seriously willing to campaign for the office, why shouldn’t he be included?
Re #2:
English psychologist Richard Wiseman notes that people are generally as good as a coin flip in detecting liars. His forthcoming Quirkiology book covers his work in testing humans as lie detectors among other interesting experiments. His website (linked), has a video where you can participate in the lie detection study.
By the way, he gives an excellent presentation, so keep an eye out…
Require each candidate to dance with a cat.
If you want better debates you should probaly do something about the people. Why is academic debates usually conducted at a higher level than political ones?
Because the audience you need to persuade is knowledgeable and cares about the subject, and has having the ability to spot logical errors.
Unless you somehow magically make the american public possess these properties, there will be no incentitive for the politicians to have a substastive debate.
The ‘Firing Line’ debates were great. Why not allow the candidates to
ask and answer questions of their opponents. The Q&As would be timed,
as they were on ‘Firing Line’. There would be one moderator, who would
turn off the microphone of anyone who went over time. The debators could
take notes, and challenge each other on contested points. Any point that
went uncontested would be scored for whoever made it. In this way, a score
would be kept, to be tabulated at the end by either the moderator or a computer.
Anyone who failed to get at least a ’70%’ (weighted) score, would be dropped
from further debates. The ‘winner’ could set the agenda for the next debate.
This would be more interesting to me than ‘talking points as debate’.
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