I have a long record of cynicism about modern presidential debates. In August 2020, I wrote:
There is something somewhat ridiculous to me to the assumption on which presidential debates in their modern incarnation, both in primaries and in the general election, depend: namely, that how a given individual performs on television for an extended period of time is in some way a meaningful and revelatory test of presidential fitness.
Last night’s Republican presidential debate did not change my mind. I could recite my own assessments of what happened — Nikki Haley did surprisingly well, Tim Scott surprisingly did not, Mike Pence often seemed like the most serious candidate there, Ron DeSantis sometimes seemed like he wasn’t there at all, and Vivek Ramaswamy was not exactly a man for others — but my colleagues have already done a much better job of hashing it all out.
I also confess to feeling a certain futility about such commentary, even if done well (and not just because of who wasn’t there). More than most events, presidential debates embody the Rashomon character of our age. The same group of people watch the same event but interpret it radically differently, based on their own observations but also on self-interest. The most obvious demonstration of this self-interested peddling of competing narratives happens in the post-debate “spin room,” where debate participants and their allies vie for epistemological supremacy. Kudos to John McCormack for extracting something productive in such a setting by securing an answer from Ramaswamy on whether Pence did the right thing on January 6.
The whole exercise reignited my distaste for it. In the Wall Street Journal, Tevi Troy explains one reason these debates are terrible: the moderators. Referring to last night’s moderators, he writes:
[Bret] Baier and fellow moderator Martha MacCallum are solid journalists. But presidential debates would be more useful for voters if the format were changed. It’s time to eliminate moderators, who have a long history of making themselves part of the story, acting as inquisitors looking to trip up the candidates.
Troy proceeds to catalogue this history, with plenty of negative examples for partisans on both sides. As a solution, he suggests a radical departure from how we conduct these events: dropping the journalist moderators:
Instead of featuring moderators so prominently in presidential debates, the public would be better served by Oxford-style debates, in which candidates give opening statements and then rebut their opponents, engaging directly with one another. Candidates could then take audience questions and conclude with closing remarks. Time limits could be enforced with signal or buzzer, or by having the microphone muted when time expired.
If done well, such a format could rise above some of the criticisms I have made of the current version of debates, which in “a nation with short attention spans, served by a media enamored of soundbites and isolated moments of high drama, cannot help but to create a stage in which the performers are just that — performers.” The utility of such a setting is mostly “incidental,” or even “accidental,” as I previously argued. Of course, a dramatic change could also go poorly, if the candidates themselves failed to adapt. Though we could learn something about them even if that happened, especially if some succeeded at it while others failed.
Regardless, it remains a risk worth taking. Even in my cynicism, I still believe that “we almost certainly need something like a presidential debate,” as “something like that kind of forum, after all, has a long history, and it has proved useful in the past.” Perhaps a moderator-free forum can get us closer to something useful.