Whatever justification Presidential debates may have
had in the past, they possess precious little in 2020. The President has been
in office for four years, with a record readily apparent, for better or worse.
His opponent was a U.S. Senator or Vice-President for more than four decades.
Voters have had plenty of time to know their positions and accomplishments by
now, and if they don’t, shame on them.
Equally important, the type of gaffes that Germond
examined in his essay were, in the grand scheme of things, trivial. Past
brain-freeze responses to the fate of Communist-dominated Poland, a President’s
invocation of a young daughter in discussing nuclear arms, or massive sighs and
eye-rolls should have mattered little when it came to assessing who would lead
our country.
Moreover, candidates’ opportunities to avoid answering
questions and introduce their own factual distortions with inadequate chance
for rebuttal are likely to rise markedly with the first debate this Tuesday and
continuing into the final two. One candidate has a habit of exaggeration that
he finds difficult to resist. The other purveys staggering falsehoods with virtually
every breath he takes. Some reporters will not be inclined to note these, while
others will simply throw their hands up at the unending task this involves.
Presidential debates offer the kind of theater that ratings-hungry
news organizations crave, but this year especially, it threatens to degenerate
into the worst combination of reality show and carnival act. It is time for the
media to rethink their commitment to it.
(Two generations have passed since the event captured
in the attached image, so, for any younger readers, this picture shows
incumbent President Jimmy Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan in one of their
1980 debates.)
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