AMAC Exclusive – By Barry Casselman
The word “forensic” is a technical term usually applied to the scientific investigation of crime or examination in medicine, but it can also be used in many other human endeavors, including the practice of public speech and debate — where I first encountered it as a member of my high school varsity debate team.
It comes to us from Latin, derived from forum, and means “in open or public view.’’
After high school, I had little interest in formal debate until I took an interest in politics, where candidate debates are routine and presidential debates became a national institution after they began to be televised in 1960.
Beginning in 2012, the presidential debate environment became increasingly controversial as Republicans asserted that the supposedly non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), which had been put in charge of organizing the debates, was not insisting enough on neutral debate moderators and questions — a circumstance that became abundantly clear during the 2020 debates between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
After repeated requests by RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to make reforms were denied or delayed by the Commission, McDaniel has threatened to require Republican presidential candidates to boycott the 2024 CPD-organized debates — which, if put into effect, would cancel the CPD debates.
The pandemic complicated the planning process for the Commission in 2020, and the difficulty of having moderators and questioners maintain neutrality in the current polarized political environment then and now made, and still makes, the CPD’s work especially challenging. But that does not relieve them from the obligation to create an even playing field for the 2024 presidential nominees.
Political debate has a long and rich tradition in the U.S., including the historic 1858 Illinois U.S. Senate debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas.
There have been high points and low points in the various presidential debates since 1960, but few of these could match the iconic drama that pitted the young Republican incumbent vice president, Richard Nixon, and the young Democratic U.S. Senator, John F. Kennedy, against one another in that first debate broadcast nationally on radio and TV. Polls afterward indicated that those who only heard that debate on radio thought Nixon had won, but those who saw the debate on TV thought the more telegenic Kennedy had won. Thus, presidential debate politics entered a new telecommunications age.
Some years ago, I was part of an instructive and notable non-presidential debate in 2007, when two potential presidential candidates, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, held a nationally broadcast debate at the Cooper Union in New York City. Gingrich and Cuomo held very different views on almost every issue, but that did not prevent them from agreeing to a fair and civilized debate format. Harold Holzer, the eminent Lincoln scholar, and former Cuomo press secretary, along with the TV news broadcaster Tim Russert, who was respected by all sides, were part of the planning team that I was privileged to be part of as well. In the same venue in which Lincoln made his most consequential speech (it led to his eventual nomination and election), two of the nation’s leading public speakers lucidly and eloquently spoke of the political differences then current in the nation. Mr. Russert skillfully and with scrupulous fairness moderated the event.
(Mr. Cuomo, perennially high in the national polls, never did run for president, but Mr. Gingrich did in 2012.)
The point of recalling this event is to illustrate that it can be done, even if it can’t be done by the present Committee on Presidential Debates. McDaniel is right to insist on a fair debate environment, as would be the Democratic National Committee.
With more than two years before the next presidential election, and the nominees unknown, now is the time to plan, negotiate, and finalize the format and rules for the next presidential debates so that the terms of the debate can be acceptable to both sides. If the current Committee on Presidential Debates is unwilling or unable to do so, a new organizing structure should be created.
America’s voters want and deserve fair presidential debates.