At the second presidential debate in 1988, CNN’s Bernard Shaw, annoyed by “artful dodging” by candidates, decided to blast Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush out of their comfort zones in the questions he posed at the start. He asked Bush, whose choice of Dan Quayle as his running mate had not gone down easily, whether, if he were to die in office, he would still think that the choice had been good for his country.
To Dukakis, attacked for having furloughed a killer who then raped a woman, he asked: “If Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered,” would he cling to his lenient prescriptions on crime? Bush said, “Bernie!” and went into a canned response on Quayle’s virtues, but Dukakis launched into a flaccid routine about crime statistics that destroyed whatever small chance he had left to win the election.
Shaw’s female co-panelists had asked him to rephrase the question or drop it completely, but he wanted “to see what was there” under the packaging. And he was right. Candidates should be zapped, on a regular basis, by panelists who apply the prods fairly. But today’s parties try to run their debates for the comfort and coddling of all of their possible candidates. And in both primary and presidential encounters, most of the provoking (also known as the “gotcha”) questions target the Republican side.
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Ted Cruz was right when he brought the house down in the CNBC circus by charging that Harwood et. al. tried to goad the debaters into embarrassing themselves and attacking each other. But his proposed solution — to have Republican debates moderated by Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh — misses the mark, as what the parties don’t need is more insularity, more self-satisfaction and more embracing of marginal themes.
The primaries are the place where the candidates talk to themselves and each other, to their most intense and committed supporters, and have no contact at all with the less-aligned sort who actually tend to decide our elections. The primaries are places where candidates make the commitments and statements they spend the rest of the season trying to explain or deny.
Conservatives say Romney lost because he was “moderate,” but surveys show he lost because he lost Hispanics so badly, and failed the question of which candidate “cares about people like me,” due to the words “47 percent” and “self-deportation” that he had uttered to please the base earlier.
Democrats this year will doubtless have similar problems with the Keystone pipeline, their embrace of the “Black (but not all) Lives Matter” movement and their hostility towards the police. And after the 2012 season, when Candy Crowley and George Stephanopoulos openly aided the Democrats, Republicans didn’t need John Harwood and company to show them that some moderators don’t care much for fairness, or perhaps even know what it is.
How to solve these two problems in one simple measure? Have one common format for primaries and presidential forays alike. Take two fairly fair newsmen, like Chuck Todd and Chris Wallace, flank them with partisans like E.J. Dionne and Bill Kristol, Dana Perino and Mike McCurry or George Will and whoever is willing to face him, and have them question both parties at once. Each side would hear arguments made from the other side’s viewpoint, which, since each party has been addressing its own set of issues, can do both of them nothing but good.
Neither party will later find itself blinking when the primaries end and it staggers out of the cave of its fans into the harsh blinding light of the national argument. Perhaps Shaw himself can be lured out of retirement. Bernie, we miss you! Bernie, come back!
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
