Last night’s debate was somewhat painful to watch, like that one time when a bunch of school bullies held down a fellow student and forced him to submit to a right and proper old-fashioned American haircut. I know that many voters (and apparently all the pundits) just love a robust display of alpha-male moderator-humping dominance, but as for me, I cannot think of anything that I desire less in a democratic leader than such a vulgar display of will to power.
That said, I don’t think that the Presidential debates really move the meter all that much, unless someone soils himself, passes out, or physically attacks his opponent. There is a specific set of skills involved in debating well, and rather few of them actually translate into solid executive leadership. In fact, one can quite often win a debate by making invalid inferences from unsound premises, if you speak boldly and confidently, with at least surface plausibility, while pumping the audience’s intuitions and playing to their emotions. This is, in fact, how Bill Craig wins pretty much all of his debates.
Slick arguments that win debates, however, are often found helpless in the steely cold grip of Fridge Logic the next day, or the next, or the next. Eventually, the pundit class will stop swooning about how well the challenger did in the moment, ‘changing the game’ under the brilliant glare of the klieg lights, and the fact-checkers will turn their bespectacled gaze upon the arguments themselves and determine whether the debaters actually got their facts straight or made any mathematically impossible promises.
At the same time, the audience is going to be visiting and revisiting their refrigerators, occasionally wondering the same thing. While fishing around for the last of the Old Style Light, they are going to ask themselves whether even more tax cuts for those who don’t need any help will somehow trickle down to them. They will wonder how cutting federal income could possibly help lower the annual deficit. They are going to remember the various prequels in which the very same script was played out, and they are going to remember how those stories ended. They are, in short, going to work it out for themselves. I have to believe this, because otherwise I’ll lose faith in democracy itself. Just in case, though, please find your nearest undecided voter and try to talk them through it.
