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Do political debates any longer matter?
That would depend on the nature of the debate. The debate Americans most often think of when the word “debate” is mentioned is the famous Lincoln/Douglas debates in 1858. Note the plural; the debates were held in seven Illinois towns. The remarks of the debaters were transcribed by stenographers and printed nearly in full in various newspapers.
Since her elevation to a possible presidency, Kamala Harris has sedulously avoided a public exposure she could not easily manipulate. Media interrogations have been few, and only one debate has been scheduled.
The Lincoln/Douglas debates occurred when American journalism was just hitting its stride. There were at the time Republican and Democrat papers – and, helpfully, no Facebook or Twitter eruptions.
Journalistic partisanship was shameless and unabashed. Nowadays, partisanship is tucked away into the dark recesses of media stories. Consistent views of media bias show that a preponderance of reporters and editors lean to the left. The internet, a refreshing oasis of contrary opinion, appears to be stoutly contrarian. The managers of the larger internet outposts – Facebook is a case in point -- are highly selective in what they choose to feature on their sites.
Free internet access to major press outlets is becoming exceedingly rare. Everyone, including press publishers, wants to make at the margin enough in profits to sustain their print publications, and so access to major press outlets now requires the payment of a viewer’s fee. Print media is shrinking and, because profit is the mother’s milk of publication, much of what appears in the legacy media is unavailable to those who decline to subscribe to leading papers. The architecture of journalism has changed considerably since the Lincoln/Douglas years, not always for the better. In the current political environment, it is much easier to – Lincoln’s words – “fool most of the people most of the time.”
Among politicians, debates are not wanted if unneeded. That is the lesson we should draw from President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign against former President Donald Trump. Biden, it will be recalled, avoided media detection assiduously by, his critics said, “hiding in his basement” and offering up huge dollops of political fluff, much of it designed to showcase Biden as a “moderate Democrat.” His successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, has cribbed leaves from Biden’s playbook.
Campaigning for office in the modern period has rarely been the same as governing while in office. President Biden, once installed in the White House, became a raging, foaming-at-the-mouth progressive. To say he spent tax money like a drunken sailor, giving a lift to a cumulative inflation rate of 20% -- some say the figure is higher – is an unjust slur on drunken sailors. No one in the progressive Democrat Party, certainly none of the all Democrat members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, seems overly concerned with spending, and one searches in vain for any mention of serious, long term spending cuts.
Biden’s conspicuous debate failure against Trump rattled the confidence of Democrats to such an extent that party leaders – former President Barrack Obama, leader of the US Senate Chuck Schumer, former Speaker of the US House Nancy Pelosi, and prominent media heads – none too gently shoved Biden out of the Democrat Party plane. It was a collective shove administered by the lights of the national Democrat Party, some of whom, Pelosi conspicuous among them, later suggested that Biden’s “heroic” decision to forgo reelection to the presidency had earned him a place on Mount Rushmore.
Biden’s debate failure was owing to his increasingly visible frailties, some of them medical. Harris is not frail. But she is relying on the same cloak of invisibility, and the same fluffy, content free campaign presentation.
Republicans are quick to point out there are no policy prescriptions on Harris’ political site. And, of course, the Democrat Nominating Convention was free of domestic and foreign policy platform positions, the whole mess of political pottage bubbling with visionary political and cultural change-for-change-sake reforms.
The soft spot in the Democrat Party armor is an overreliance on contradictory positions. In some cases the contradictions have been softened through improvised retrenchment. Once in favor of fracking restrictions, Harris has now repudiated her past contempt for fracking. Her prior positions concerning the supply of energy were calibrated to cause the least concern to environmental extremists.
And, of course, there are indissoluble differences between progressives and conservatives. Progressives believe that an ever increasing progressive tax current should flow from taxpayers to Washington DC, thereafter to be distributed by an army of bureaucrats to groups that can best reelect Democrat incumbents or promising progressives. Conservatives regard the trip as unnecessarily expensive and counterproductive, however politically expedient it may be.
The needy can most efficiently be helped through a negative income tax – see Milton Freedman, and do not fail to notice the primitive non-inflation figures in his discussion with Bill Buckley – that would provide relief directly to the poor, avoiding both the administrative cost of the tax transit to Washington and back to the states, the political corruption nestled in the dark corridors of administrative complexity, and induced inflationary producing over-taxation or, as progressives prefer to label their tax heists, budget surpluses.
