Nine Ways to Elect a President
By MARVIN KALB
Cambridge, Mass.
NOW that the Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls have held their first pre-primary debates, it might not be a bad idea to begin thinking about how we handle the final, really important debates leading up to the general election.
For the past three decades, the universally agreed upon model has been three televised debates among the presidential candidates and one among the vice-presidential candidates. That’s no longer good enough.
In a recent debate of another sort, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, proposed that the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees debate nine times between Labor Day and Election Day. He was hoping that these nine debates would force substance into the final phase of a campaign that is almost certain by that time to be exhausted by cynicism, sound bites and 24/7 drivel.
Mr. Gingrich’s opponent in the debate, Mario Cuomo, the former New York governor, quickly bought into the proposal. So did Rudolph Giuliani, the New York mayor turned presidential candidate, whom Mr. Gingrich said he had approached earlier in the day with his idea. Tim Russert, the debate’s moderator, promised to raise the idea on his television program, “Meet the Press,” with every campaigning guest.
Mr. Gingrich’s proposal for nine presidential debates is strikingly similar to a 1991 Harvard proposal called “nine Sundays.” The proposal grew out of an effort by scholars, journalists and politicians to find ways to improve the political process. Everyone in the group — which I led — was disgusted by the shallowness of the 1988 campaign, and we saw and heard little to encourage us that the 1992 campaign would be any better. Roger Ailes, then a Republican political consultant, was characteristically blunt when he told us: “If you didn’t like ’88, you’re going to hate ’92.”
What could be done? Our conclusion was that only the news media had the power in our democracy to educate the American people about the issues of a presidential campaign. So we proposed that the networks provide 90 minutes of evening or prime time on nine successive Sundays between Labor Day and Election Day for conversations or debates with the major candidates in a studio without an audience. Substance was key, no frills. We also suggested that each event be limited to a single subject. (In the current context, one conversation would almost certainly be about Iraq.)
Why Sunday evenings? Because that’s one of the nights with the highest television viewership, and that’s when the major candidates can reach the largest number of potential voters. Moreover, we thought holding these encounters on Sunday evenings would allow the candidates ample time to campaign during the week, and yet allow them on Saturdays and Sundays to recoup and prepare for nationally televised appearances.
Considerate as we thought we were, we quickly learned that both the networks and the candidates conspired in their own way to sidestep the challenge we posed. The networks felt it was not their job to fix the political system, nor did they wish to lose the revenue from Sunday programming. The candidates praised us to the skies, but ducked the opportunity to break out of their comfortable scripts.
Since then, though, much has changed, especially in the world of political communications. The Fox network, Fox News, MSNBC and NPR were not then the powerhouses they are today. It is hard to underestimate this change. There are now nine major networks, one for each of the nine Sundays of proposed presidential debate in the 2008 general election campaign. They are ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, PBS and NPR. None would be asked to sacrifice more than the potential profit derived from 90 minutes of prime time. Obviously they could all cover the nine debates if they wished, but each would be obliged to cover only one.
The candidates may once again sidestep the challenge of “nine Sundays” by arguing that it is at best an untested concept and at worst a waste of their time. But is it? After 9/11, with America’s role in the world more uncertain than ever, would it not make more sense to provide the voters with regular, predictable, serious access to their next president?
The networks have this power. The candidates have this opportunity. But do they have the guts?
Marvin Kalb, a former television network correspondent, is a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. |
