Last Night's Debate

Barack Obama has become a much better debater throughout this primary season. Clinton, who is better in the format, had her hands full last night in what was pretty entertaining political theatre.

But really, I feel like we have been numbed by the fact that these debates are such crap. There was literally one segment of the debate where the two candidates were really going at each other with substance: the health care debate. Obama and Clinton have differing views on health care, and both were making points back and forth in an effort to, you know, engage one another, rather than to engage a looming President Bush or lobbyists.

So, there was this great debate going on over health care policy for a few minutes. Clinton believes in mandates and potentially garnishing wages. Obama believes that controlling the costs more would encourage people to buy. They both made good points, and they legitimately disagreed on something.

And the moderators kept trying to steer the debate somewhere else.

I just don't get it at all. They actually get good, lively, exciting, substantive content, and they run away from it. No! If there is good policy debate going on, that is both exciting and substantive, throw the rest of the stuff out, and let it play out!

The whole point of debate is for candidates to attempt to sell themselves and their ideas, relative to the other contenders. They are asked a question about a given issue, and they answer it. Someone else may poke holes in their answer and propose something different. Then they respond. Debates are a good way to test ideas, see how they stand up against criticism, and to lay out the differences in candidates. Obama and Clinton are both liberal Democrats, but they have some legitimate policy disagreements.

So last night, the concept of "debating" finally died, in my eyes. Not only does the format deliberately make engagement on issues difficult, but the moderators simply will not tolerate engagement on issues.

As an aside, I was thinking about the direction of this blog once the horse race stuff dies down a bit. I think I will do a lot of personal political stuff, talking about issues in particular, rather than politics as a whole. I think there are a lot of issues worth hashing out and looking into.