Yes, the Fox Business presidential debate Wednesday night really was THAT bad.
We’ve now had a couple of these made-for-TV food fights with the Republican candidates not named Donald Trump slugging it out in a shameless battle for airtime, and the only real takeaway you can derive from them is that the format is played out and the resulting product is utterly unwatchable.
What would be awesome is if the current format of TV debates got completely junked and something else replaced it.
It’s not even the candidates’ fault. They’re trying to get whatever airtime they can and desperate to land some canned sound bite people might remember, though in a can isn’t how memorable sound bites come.
This shouldn’t continue.
1. The Frontrunners Don’t Show Anymore
Trump’s absence, for the second time in a row, actually led to something more interesting for voters to sink their teeth into than the debate itself. Instead of showing up at the beautiful, but acoustically inappropriate, Reagan Library to trade punches with a bunch of candidates with anywhere from one-fifth to one-fiftieth his support, he gave an interesting speech to the striking auto workers in Michigan. That came after Trump did a massively watched interview with Tucker Carlson that hit the internet opposite the first debate.
All of the reasons why Trump hasn’t showed up for either of them have been discussed before, and I won’t belabor them here. In theory, he ought to be at the debate, but in practice, what’s the point? So he can get asked to rebut lame and juvenile crap like this?
YOUR REACTION: What do you make of Chris Christie @GovChristie attacking Donald Trump during the GOP debate and renaming him Donald Duck? pic.twitter.com/MAlqjDAADY
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) September 28, 2023
Why bother subjecting yourself to that unless you have to? And Trump doesn’t have to.
And it isn’t just Trump. Here in Louisiana, we’re only a couple of weeks out (and early voting starts on Saturday) from the primary in our gubernatorial race, and Jeff Landry, the favorite, has skipped all but one of the televised debates. It’s simply not worth it as a frontrunner to stand on the stage with all the people who covet your campaign funds, organization, and support and try to bat away a bunch of desperate attacks. Especially if, like Trump, you can gin up your own earned media.
And particularly since…
2. Corporate Media Is Too Vapid and Ridiculous to Ask Answerable Questions
Whoever organized that debate thought it would be a good idea to serve up Univision’s Ilia Calderón as one of the panelists.
It wasn’t.
Calderón, who is Colombian, is no doubt a creditable journalist, but English isn’t her first language and she isn’t really all that TV-ready speaking it. That could certainly be forgiven. Every single question she asked being about illegal immigrants, in what was a fairly obviously attempt to paint the Republican Party as bigoted against Latinos, can’t be.
But Calderón’s nonstop demands for campaign promises toward “Dreamers” and others not here legally weren’t the worst moments. Dana Perino, who is supposed to be better than this, provided the lowest point of all.
OMG Perino asks the candidates to vote "someone off the island." The candidates flat out refuse to do it. pic.twitter.com/OQrYeVr6Ce
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 28, 2023
We see this over and over nowadays, and apparently it’s so endemic that even the Fox News gang isn’t capable of avoiding it. You get stupid, tired old questions based on media narratives that need to be unpacked before anything like an honest, productive answer can be given, and most of them are framed in a “gotcha” posture that is designed to elicit an emotional response.
Nothing of value comes from a candidate getting insulted with a dishonest question and then having 60 seconds to respond. And when the debate is framed with lousy attack-dog questions, something else inevitably happens…
3. Long-Shot Candidates Are Incentivized to Act the Ass
I’ll admit that I don’t know much about Doug Burgum. What I see from him I generally kind of like. He comes off as a guy who would make a hell of a cabinet secretary, and it sounds like he’s been a pretty good governor of North Dakota.
But Burgum, who is barely a blip in the polls at present and has virtually zero chance of becoming more than that in this cycle, has shown up twice to these debates and proceeded to talk over the questions and other candidates in a might-as-well, what-the-hell abuse of the debate rules.
Then again, Burgum has a point when he says he had to prove he wasn’t a potted plant:
You can’t really blame him for butting in. And the other candidates don’t take him seriously, so they’ll let him talk.
But it got a lot worse than that.
Vivek Ramaswamy powers through other GOP members continually talking over him#VivekRamaswamy #GOPDebate #DebateInterruptions #PoliticalStrategy #DebateDynamics #PublicSpeaking #DebateTactics #PoliticalPerformance #GOPCandidates #DebateChallenges pic.twitter.com/FFNtWYsZr1
— Simple Shorts (@simpleshortss) September 28, 2023
Hey, Republican presidential hopefuls: When you treat the #GOPDebate like a personal town hall, and you ignore the rules of the debate, the American people can't follow anything you say. The cross-talk and interruptions don't help. pic.twitter.com/F2geEQZikD
— Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) September 28, 2023
Nikki Haley slams Vivek Ramaswamy on his ignorance on both foreign policy and the threat posed by TikTok:
“Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.”#GOPDebate pic.twitter.com/ZqojAhoEyV
— Conservative War Machine (@WarMachineRR) September 28, 2023
Now do you see why Trump didn’t show up for that?
And besides…
4. 60-Second Answer Segments Will Get You Stupid, Canned, Shallow Responses
This is what you get with the current debate format that all these news channels have determined is what they’ll give us:
Mike Pence apparently doesn’t understand that the bulk of the mass shooters who hit up schools and shopping malls and other places are suicidal to begin with, and they often prove it by eating a bullet as soon as somebody shoots back at them (either that or the whole massacre turns out to be a suicide-by-cop scenario in the first place).
But he doesn’t even bother answering Perino’s Obamacare question, and even though the answer he chooses to give to a question not asked of him is a dumb virtue-signal, you can’t really blame him for ignoring her. How is anybody supposed to answer a question about Obamacare and whether it can be replaced — and how — in 60 seconds?
At best, you’re going to get something that sounds like this to these questions…
…which, let’s face it, isn’t all that good.
Nikki Haley picked up lots of notices for that answer, mostly because she spoke quickly and made complete sentences. But it wasn’t a thoughtful response on border and immigration policy, it was a fire-hose recitation of canned talking points. A thoughtful answer would have noted that while there were flaws in Trump’s performance on closing the border, the fact was that he turned over a very manageable situation that Joe Biden destroyed intentionally in support of a host of nefarious purposes, and it would have fleshed that indictment out very clearly for the public to digest.
Except you can’t do that in 60 seconds. What you can do is spout talking points as though you had an Uzi with a clip full of them.
We’re moving out of the TV era and into the podcast era, and that’s happening for a reason. Nobody learns anything from these crappy, canned, race-’em-out-before-your-time-is-up answers.
But if there is a worst aspect to this current debate format, it’s this…
5. Sound Bites Are Overrated; the Shameless Pursuit of Sound Bites Can’t Be Rated Low Enough
Apologies for beating up Mike Pence repeatedly, but this is more or less the pinnacle of modern debate cringe:
Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) during the debate said, "I've been SLEEPING with a teacher for 38 years, for full disclosure." WATCH pic.twitter.com/aPrWWxVrUR
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) September 28, 2023
Why were we subjected to this? Because Mike Pence needs very, very badly to prove that he isn’t a bloodless, wooden automaton, and he will stop at nothing in the attempt.
And they all do it. Haley’s bitchy “you make me feel dumber” attack on Ramaswamy, Christie’s lousy “Donald Duck” quip, and practically everything that came out of poor Tim Scott’s mouth were all examples of a candidate desperately seeking a quotable sound bite moment that would define him or her and give voters some reason to believe they’re interesting people with something to say.
And most of them actually are that, at least to an extent. They just aren’t capable of showing it in this format.
Because we all know this — the really good sound bites are not canned and rehearsed. They don’t happen because some consultant programmed them into the candidate for proper regurgitation at the right time. They might be preconceived, but to be truly memorable there has to be an element of spontaneity in their delivery.
And we don’t get that anymore. We don’t get any decent anecdotes or human stories, we don’t get any real personality, we get no meat and no bones.
We get cotton candy, bickering, and a pungent smell. Because this debate format stinks every bit as badly as the corporate media functionaries who have run it aground.
Enough already.
What would better would be a tournament of head-to-head debates, together with a ceremonial drawing, or a rock-paper-scissors contest, or something.
Anything.
Made-for-TV food fights like the one Wednesday night are garbage, and it’s no surprise that the frontrunners never show up anymore.
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