M. Appeal (Mass Appeal)

As I grew up, I was infamous for making deals with my mother. My sisters had to share a room while I had my own room until I went to college, as long as I didn’t get my ears pierced until I was eighteen. I was allowed to date this boy I liked when my mom thought I was still too young for dating if I gave up chewing gum. When I wanted to go to prom at my friend’s high school that was known for a very lax administration, my mom said that I could go if I watched one of the presidential debates with her.

Unlike me while I was in high school, most people are not bribed to watch presidential debates. The people who do watch debates are often the hardcore political junkies who already know which candidate they support. How do we actually get average citizens interested in the issues and candidates enough to sit down and watch a debate? I think on some level people need to be interested in the issues because they realize that this is what shapes the world we live in. People need to watch the debates in order to become informed voters and learn more about the government that runs much of their lives. True that the Lincoln-Douglas debate style might be more interesting, but if people don’t care about the subject matter, they aren’t going to care that the debates are more interesting.

So I pose a question to other bloggers: if the debates are more interesting, will more people care about the subject matter? Or does the culture need to change before the Average Joe and Jill find the debates stimulating?

To begin researching the presidential candidate’s stances on hot topics I started by Googling a few key words, which yielded good results. The research has only just begun, but I’ve found a few sites that are doing basically the same thing we are – monitoring the candidates actions and their positions on specific issues.
One site (http://www.2decide.com/table.htm) had an interactive table that neatly lists all the presidential candidates and their positions on many important debate topics. Be sure to have a look at that, for people who might know who’s running but don’t know where the candidates stand – this is great.
The second site (http://mediamatters.org/) acts like an online watchdog. It not only covers what the candidates are doing and saying in the ‘Candidate 2008’ section, it also has good information on other topics themselves. Go here and find the ‘Issues/Topics’ button at the top and a list will pop up where you can decide on an issue (i.e. Media), a sub-issue (Propaganda/Noise Machine), then a specific topic (Hillary Clinton, etc.).
I don’t know how to add in picture links, or else I’d put a visual of the table mentioned above – if anyone could give me any pointers on blogging, it’d be appreciated. I’m new to this whole media revolution game.

Lincoln-Douglas debates were viewed as the ideal democratic debate between two opposing parties in a nonpartisan environment where each debater could express their own opinion without being interrupted. However, when reviewing political debates in the modern day it is easy to see how not only the subjects of debate but the debate itself has changed.

Debate no longer has it’s beautiful shine and unyielding luster of truth. But instead is a collection of 30 second memorized answers that any given candidate can spit out when they are asked basic questions. This does not hold true to the idea of debate or the foundation of democracy that our fair country rests on. Democracy can survive only if the candidates can give the public honest and maybe even blunt answers to the hardest questions. Modern day debates seem to be lacking the honestly once bestowed upon them because behind our candidates rushed answers sits a campaign manager and a sheet of paper reminding them how to relate to the public.

If a candidate can’t honestly relate to the public and can’t accurately describe their opinions to even the most dreaded questions how can we expect them to rule our country without corruption and hold up the ever shifting ideals of democracy?

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for me to be a more single-minded individual, a thought exacerbated by the situation I currently find myself in. The problem is, well, I have a million things to say, all relevant, all meaningful, and yet, somewhere in there I’m supposed to find one, just one that is truly meaningful to me that remains obscure and generally not discussed in blogging circles. Apathetically lamenting the imperfect world we live in that will never be anything but corrupt and an affront to democracy and freedom isn’t much of a help either. I guess I’ll start at the beginning and see where if anywhere it takes me.

The question remains, what exactly is a meaningful political debate, and how does one go about creating it? Personally, I find little in the way of meaning in the modern political climate. I see elections as a choice between the lesser of two evils, not as a test of who will be better for the country.

We live in a world where only the most conniving and deftly political creatures are amoral enough to thrive.The honest human beings, the genuinely good people who aren’t planning their next flanking maneuver on the political battlefield but are instead focusing on improving the country in meaningful and lasting ways just aren’t ruthless enough to actually make any headway against the scores of politician’s politicians. What’s more, the sole driving goal of those who wield the power to create change are using it not as promised, to create useful legislation and lead the country into a better, more productive, safe and free society. Instead the singular focus of those men (and a tiny handful of women) is to get reelected. And when they can’t get reelected, they have their children or their siblings or their wives run.

Perhaps more than anything, it is these legacies that anger me most about the political climate in this country. Virtually inheriting a job always struck me as very un-American and inhibitive of true progress and democracy. The idea of government of, by and for the people just doesn’t seem to work when people imply a virtual aristocracy in a country who lists among its founding principles the fact that “all men are created equal.” Call me crazy, call me an idealist, but I was under the impression the founding fathers meant for political offices to be contests among a host of different people, not a cycle of one super-powerful political family after another.

I am sat on my computer for numerous hours pondering what I was going to blog about. I can imagine that I am not alone in this. Personally, I am not truly inspired by the topic of this blog. I have to admit that politics bore me and my interest is quickly lost.
I would like to mention one thing though, one of my summer readings was Work Hard, Study and… Keep out of Politics by James A. Baker, III, I will let the title speak for itself. Here is an excerpt from his book:
“Disagree agreeably. Listen respectfully. Treat everyone, allies and adversaries alike, with dignity. Return phone calls. Count the votes. When you’re ahead, call the question. When you’re behind, work harder. If you can’t get everything you want, get what you can. When you can’t win, fall back and fight another day.
Respect the press and get to know reporters. Talk to them on background most of the time, but on the record with necessary. Help them understand the administration’s position. And never lie to them.”
Taking these words from one of my personal heroes lets get the presidential candidates to talk and get back to the real issues. Let’s forget about who Oprah is voting for, who has raised the most money this week and get the candidates to talk about homeland security, the war, social security… The issues that matter.

A few things I’ve noticed about the blog. We definitely need to put in up categories so it is not one giant string to posts for people to read (or not read). Second, I was thinking about having an opening page with the sub-sections and giving a bit of a tease as to what you would see in each sub-section for that particular week. I think that would be really cool and would wet peoples’ appetites for the blog. This blog should look good and function well and I think these additions would make these goals possible.

Setting out on my first blog post I was set upon finding the strangest, most off the wall or amusing debate fun facts that I could find. While doing some research however, I stumbled upon an interesting press release about a group intent on making presidential candidates more approachable to the general public. According to the piece, in 2004 Cranium, Inc. (the company responsible for the games Cranium, Hullabaloo, and other family friendly games) invited both Democratic and Republican candidates and their families to a Cranium Turbo Edition Game Night. The goal of the evening was to provide Americans a look at the candidates in a more casual, laid back respect. The questions were not rehearsed and off-the-wall. According to the Cranium executives in charge of the event, the goal of the event was to bring Americans a fresh new outlook at the candidates. Instead of stuffy suits and pre-meditated debate questions, the candidates were allowed to be fun and off-the-wall. Personally, I think that this is a great idea. We hear candidates repeat their speeches from word for word from one city to the next. Often Robert Redford’s character from the 1972 film The Candidate comes to my mind. In one clip he sits in the car reciting the same speech over and over, driving himself insane. These new debates might be a great way to let the American public see how our candidates really feel about issues when they may speak about them in a more casual setting. Isn’t it about time for us to see our candidates in a more human light? Let’s hear about what they have to say when the speeches and carefully anticipated responses are gone!

Can meaningful political debate really be conducted between eight people?

The formal debates with the eight democratic presidential hopefuls have been progressing. This year has seen ten so far, the last being in Florida on September 9. But with eight men and women all vying for the spotlight, it has been hard to distinguish each person’s take on every issue.

In July, John Edwards approached Hilary Clinton onstage at one of these debates and proposed that they should arrange something with a “more serious and smaller group.” The way he framed the proposal was to encourage more serious discussion.

Lesser-known candidates like Dennis Kucinich and Chris Dodd have taken issue with his plans to exclude them from future debate. Kucinich went so far as to send letters to both Edwards and Clinton, challenging them to one-on-one debates. Neither responded in the affirmative.

So is it a good idea to debate with a smaller group? Probably. But not at the cost of excluding other contenders. The people have to know all of their options to make the most informed decision.

In a recent article, from The Nation, Nicholas von Hoffman expressed his dissatisfaction over the status of the American political debate. As he put it, “What passes for a political debate in the United States today is little more than dueling sound bites.”

His article, subtlety titled America’s Idiotic Political Debates, mentions the good old days, when the media griped about politicians who talked too much during the debates.

“If you go back to the time of H.L. Mencken or Mark Twain, the educated classes also complained that American politicians were divided into two classes, vapid windbags and screeching baboons. Yet the country prospered.

“If things are worse today it is because the windbags are gone.”

Things have changed greatly since the days of the Lincoln-Douglass Debates, when the first candidate spoke for an hour, the second spoke for an hour and a half, then allowed the first candidate an half hour rebuttal. During the recent CNN/Youtube debates, Presidential hopefuls were lucky to speak for more than 30 seconds before being shushed by distractively attractive moderator Anderson Cooper.

Although the Youtube format was a great step forward in regards to getting the public involved with the political process, not much debate actually occurred. A return to the long-winded debates of yore may be too much, but can we really even call these half-a-minute Q/A sessions debates anymore?

“In defense of their idiotic political displays, television executives and campaign operatives apparently believe that a minute of speech uninterrupted by either a murder or a copulation scene is about all TV viewers can take. America, they insist, suffers from attention-deficit disorder. It’s a nation with the fidgets.” –Hoffman, The Nation

Here’s the link again: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070521/von_hoffman

I’ve been looking at some scholarly atricles and essays that apply to our presidential debate blog. Even with the rise of sites like Youtube, television still dominates how many Americans watch candidates debate, and in turn form their opinions on how to vote. So I thought it would be interesting to look at how this precedent was set. The Kennedy/Nixon debates in 1960 were the point at which the electoral process moved into the livingrooms of Americans across the nation. An article by Liette Gidlow at historynoy.org takes a look at the rise of the television era of debate. The link: http://www.historynow.org/09_2004/historian2.html