Not to speak ill of the network that decided to make Dan Rather the face of its news operation, but HDNet didn’t acquit itself well when it ran Saturday night’s “Black and Brown” debate from Iowa. Fully half of the participants began the evening with defective microphones. Yes, it was delightful to see Dennis Kucinich talking and yet not hear him, but I don’t think that was part of the plan. After the third candidate was victimized by a dead mic, one of the NPR personalities moderating the debate informed us that we should be understanding because having ten live mics on a stage is no small technological feat. So a fledgling network (HDNet) and a government agency (NPR) combine to produce a debate, and they insist that having functioning microphones is too tall a task to handle adequately. Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations! As its name implies, the “Black and Brown” debate exists to address issues that specifically concern America’s black (African American) and brown (Latino) communities. As a tribute to the latter, one of the hosts and Bill Richardson would occasionally lapse into Spanish, causing me to bark at my wife, “Did you hit the SAP button?” The substance of the shindig was consistently laughable. All the Democrats agreed that the president is a near-mythical creature who has the power to end all manners of suffering for the black and brown communities. They further agreed that George W. Bush’s refusal to use these powers has caused unimaginable hardships the past seven years. But no one cares about the substance of the world’s first-ever presidential debate broadcast in breathtaking 1080i High Definition. You care how the candidates looked. I gotta tell you, some of it wasn’t pretty. Chris Dodd fared the worst. His head looked like it was sitting uneasily atop a mountain of jowls, threatening to recede into his shoulders at any moment. Dennis Kucinich looked almost “alien,” and not in the “brown” sense of the term. Joe Biden’s hair looked like a special effect conjured up by a rookie intern from George Lucas’s shop. Speaking of George Lucas, Bill Richardson bore a vague resemblance to a bilingual Jabba the Hut. On the other side of the spectrum, John Edwards still looked pretty, although not quite as pretty as he does in low definition. Oddly, he was wearing a pair of all-weather hiking shoes instead of the loafers or wingtips that would have gone with his suit. Leave it to the humble son of a mill worker to wear sensible American shoes, no matter how silly they looked. The hi-def Obama looked just like the low-def Obama, although he looked very uncomfortable sitting in a chair that appeared a couple of sizes too small for his lanky frame. Hillary looked the best. For real. I think she benefited from always wearing makeup, and knowing how to cover her weaknesses and accentuate her strengths. Unfortunately for Hillary, I doubt anyone was watching. The other affiliate of the HD network was doing a Hitchcock marathon. The restored “Rear Widow” or Chris Dodd’s badly-in-need-of-restoration jowls? For sane people, that decision was likely a no-brainer.
