Our duopolistic "debate" club
In
2007, I happened to be in France during the run-up to the presidential
elections there. One evening, I turned on the TV to discover one of the
candidates seated at a round table, Charlie Rose style, with three
journalists who pelted him with substantive questions and aggressive
follow-ups for the better part of an hour. No commercial breaks. No
handlers. No "ground rules." Just a serious, substantive, long-form
discussion between four adults who knew what they were talking about. That is what is expected of serious candidates for the presidency of
that particular republic.
Not so in America, where the citizenry has long-since acquiesced to an electoral process that is explicitly designed to protect candidates from meaningful scrutiny - in other words, to prevent the public from taking the full measure of the candidates, one of whom will shortly become the most powerful human being on planet Earth. Instead, we are granted a limited number of carefully stage-managed glimpses of the candidates, courtesy of The Commission on Presidential Debates.
The Commission on Presidential Debates sounds like an impartial, official organization. It's not - it's a private entity established by the two major parties, who run it in partnership with each other. It's not part of the government. It's not chartered by congress or the executive branch. It is not funded with taxpayer dollars, but instead by corporate contributions (tax-deductible, no doubt, which means that it actually is funded by taxpayer dollars, but without any accountability to taxpayers themeselves). It has no mandate or obligation to serve the public interest. It serves the interests of the two major political parties that dominate American politics the way Boeing and Airbus dominate the airline industry.
The Democratic and Republican parties are competitors, but they also share a mutual interest in preserving their duopoly by excluding any other potential competitors from the marketplace that they jointly control. One of the ways they preserve this duopoly is by excluding alternative parties, which we inevitably call "third parties" in unwitting homage to the unassailable and unquestioned dominion of the only two parties that really count. Indeed, it can be fairly argued that this exclusion of alternative voices is the very reason that the Commission came into existence in the first place.
According to its own website, "The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) was established in 1987 to ensure that debates, as a permanent part of every general election, provide the best possible information to viewers and listeners." This is just a plain, contemptuous lie - unless by "best possible information" they mean, more or less, "the information that best represents the candidates as they themselves want voters to perceive them." In other words, best for them, not for us, not for democracy.
In October 1988, one month before the presidential election, the genuinely impartial League of Women Voters announced that it was withdrawing its sponsorship of the presidential debates because both campaigns were effectively colluding to "perpetrate a fraud on the American voter" by mutually agreeing to a host of conditions on the debate format.
To its credit, the League did not become an accessory to this fraud, but - alas - their principled stand did nothing at all to modify, let alone prevent, the "fraud" from recurring during every presidential election campaign since. Americans have passively accepted an electoral process that is deliberately designed to prevent them from acquiring useful information about the candidates. Major party candidates are shielded from exposure and scrutiny while alternative party candidates (or for that matter unaffiliated candidates) are denied exposure.
Not so in America, where the citizenry has long-since acquiesced to an electoral process that is explicitly designed to protect candidates from meaningful scrutiny - in other words, to prevent the public from taking the full measure of the candidates, one of whom will shortly become the most powerful human being on planet Earth. Instead, we are granted a limited number of carefully stage-managed glimpses of the candidates, courtesy of The Commission on Presidential Debates.
The Commission on Presidential Debates sounds like an impartial, official organization. It's not - it's a private entity established by the two major parties, who run it in partnership with each other. It's not part of the government. It's not chartered by congress or the executive branch. It is not funded with taxpayer dollars, but instead by corporate contributions (tax-deductible, no doubt, which means that it actually is funded by taxpayer dollars, but without any accountability to taxpayers themeselves). It has no mandate or obligation to serve the public interest. It serves the interests of the two major political parties that dominate American politics the way Boeing and Airbus dominate the airline industry.
The Democratic and Republican parties are competitors, but they also share a mutual interest in preserving their duopoly by excluding any other potential competitors from the marketplace that they jointly control. One of the ways they preserve this duopoly is by excluding alternative parties, which we inevitably call "third parties" in unwitting homage to the unassailable and unquestioned dominion of the only two parties that really count. Indeed, it can be fairly argued that this exclusion of alternative voices is the very reason that the Commission came into existence in the first place.
According to its own website, "The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) was established in 1987 to ensure that debates, as a permanent part of every general election, provide the best possible information to viewers and listeners." This is just a plain, contemptuous lie - unless by "best possible information" they mean, more or less, "the information that best represents the candidates as they themselves want voters to perceive them." In other words, best for them, not for us, not for democracy.
In October 1988, one month before the presidential election, the genuinely impartial League of Women Voters announced that it was withdrawing its sponsorship of the presidential debates because both campaigns were effectively colluding to "perpetrate a fraud on the American voter" by mutually agreeing to a host of conditions on the debate format.
"It has become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and honest answers to tough questions... The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public."
To its credit, the League did not become an accessory to this fraud, but - alas - their principled stand did nothing at all to modify, let alone prevent, the "fraud" from recurring during every presidential election campaign since. Americans have passively accepted an electoral process that is deliberately designed to prevent them from acquiring useful information about the candidates. Major party candidates are shielded from exposure and scrutiny while alternative party candidates (or for that matter unaffiliated candidates) are denied exposure.
The Commission excludes alternative parties by closing the debates to all candidates who have failed to achieve an average of 15 percent support in five major polls (this year the five polls are ABC-Washington Post; CBS-New York Times; CNN-Opinion Research Corporation; Fox News; and NBC-Wall Street Journal). This 15 percent threshold is one of the ways the two major parties effectively erase the presence of alternative voices in American politics.
15 percent manages to sound substantial enough to weed out the crackpots while being low enough to open the process to legitimate alternative voices. According to the commission's website: "It was the CPD’s judgment that the 15 percent threshold best balanced the goal of being sufficiently inclusive to invite those candidates considered to be among the leading candidates, without being so inclusive that invitations would be extended to candidates with only very modest levels of public support, thereby jeopardizing the voter education purposes of the debates." But that's bullshit. It's really an arbitrary number that sounds reasonable but isn't at all - it's high enough to achieve its purpose of excluding alternative candidates while being low enough to not be obvious about it.
It's ridiculous to make polling data the criterion. It leaves the process to for-profit companies that are not accountable to the public, and have no duty or interest in promoting an optimal electoral process. What they want is the drama of a "head-to-head" battle. More important, though, is the simple and obvious fact that citizens can't express support for candidates they've never heard of. How can an alternative-party candidate with limited resources get enough exposure to be seriously considered for the debates?
In 2012, more than 126 million people cast votes - let's call it 120 million. That means that an alternative party candidate would need to attract the consistent support of about 18 million registered voters in order to be admitted into one of the Presidential Commission debates. In a four-way race, Gary Johnson is currently polling at 9 or 10 percent, and Jill Stein at around 5 percent. Those numbers represent millions of supporters - about 12 million and 6 million respectively. Those are hardly "only modest levels of support."
There should be more debates. The first should be wide open. After all legitimate candidates have had an opportunity to show themselves to the electorate, the number of participants can be whittled down based on polling. If we really want to consider ourselves a democracy, we should require that all serious candidates have the chance to make their cases before the whole electorate.