John, thanks for your engaging response, but permit me to push
back.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that the debate, as executed
by its moderators, did help super delegates decide which
of their candidates is more electable, as you
suggested. Should journalists moderating a debate really focus
on asking questions that best serve the institutional needs of the
Democratic Party? I don’t think so, particularly given that super
delegates are privy to all sorts of polling data, the knowledge
they’ve accumulated closely following politics and actual voting
results in past primaries, whereas the average voter’s decision is
far more influenced by these finite debate appearances.
As James Fallows put it in
the piece I linked earlier:
When ordinary citizens have a chance to pose
questions to political leaders, they rarely ask about the game of
politics. They want to know how the reality of politics will affect
them-through taxes, programs, scholarship funds, wars. Journalists
justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are
the public’s representatives, asking the questions their fellow
citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with
Presidents and senators. In fact they ask questions that only their
fellow political professionals care about. And they often do so-as
at the typical White House news conference-with a discourtesy and
rancor that represent the public’s views much less than they
reflect the modern journalist’s belief that being independent boils
down to acting hostile.
Perhaps you’re right that fewer people would watch that sort of
debate, though I’m not so sure: questions about issues that affect
people’s lives need not be wonky policy questions. And I’m less
sure than you are about the answer to a well-crafted War on Drugs
question — it just doesn’t seem obvious to me, particularly given
Obama’s haragues about the criminal justice system.
My hunch is that ABC didn’t garner 11 million debate viewers
because Americans anticipated how the moderators would behave —
they couldn’t know beforehand that it would be a debate unlike any
that preceded it, and the negative audience reaction to the
moderators suggests that their performance will turn voters off to
watching in the future.
I’d finally say that the questions I posed won’t come up in a
campaign, as you pointed out, but that’s largely because
journalists don’t ask about them in debates, conference calls, etc.
The campaigns don’t control coverage — the press is pretty good at
bringing up controversies they don’t want to talk about, sometimes
for good reason — but insofar as there are important policy issues
that the Obama, Clinton and McCain campaigns aren’t talking about,
it’s the media’s job to bring them up too. You may be right that
during a general election the McCain campaign won’t hit Obama or
Clinton on the topics I raised (like the Democratic Party’s
reflexive, extra-constitutional anti-federalism). On the other
hand, I can imagine McCain asking Obama about federal powers
vis-a-vis state power sooner than he asks, “Does Reverend Wright
love America as much as you do?”
