Tethered Swimming

“Welcome to Decision ‘96, it’s eighteen months until the election and tonight we’ll focus on the vice-presidential candidates. Since this is so boring and pointless, we will periodically be inserting clips from Baywatch.” - Debate Host

Each party staged a debate this week, no casualties were reported. I managed to avoid watching a single second of either and it wasn’t even that hard. It’s not going to get any easier though; according to The Note there are six Republican debates and a whopping twelve Democratic debates between now and January. This is more than a little insane given just how little gets said.

With two in one week and eighteen more in the next eight months, we are officially at ludicrous speed. On the bright side, we probably won’t need to endure this many four years from now. For the ‘08 election there is no incumbent running and there is no designated successor to the incumbent; that hasn’t happened in a long time. ‘68 comes close, but the fix was pretty much in for Nixon after the Republican debacle in ‘64. That puts as all the way back to ‘52, where both Stevenson and Eisenhower had to fight for their spots. That was a hell of a long time ago; do you know how old someone is today who was old enough to vote in 1952? Seventy-six. That’s more than the three score and ten you get in the Bible.

There were only four television channels in 1952 and one of them was the DuMont network! Today we’ve got more channels than anyone can possible watch and they all want to host a debate. The rub is that these primary debates are caught between two contradictory forces. On one side is the enormous advantage the premier candidates have in terms of fame and fortune. On the other is the tattered principal of equal participation and equal time. The campaign is run and covered with enormous bias towards those premier candidates, but coming out and saying so, by limiting participation in the primary debates like we do the general election debates, is prohibited. It’s a sop to the idea that anyone can win. But there’s no salary cap in politics, so the idea that anyone can win is utter fiction.

The only people these debates serve are the premier candidates and the press geeks. The premier candidates get to glide ever closer to the primaries without engaging one other or opening the door to other challengers. There’s no point in really knocking on each other; all of the big names have the deep pockets to go the distance anyway, so why bother? They also have no interest in allowing anyone else into the club of the anointed, and so long as they avoid saying anything too horrifying that club remains closed to new members.

The press gets something to report that, by the low standards of the day, qualifies as news. If your job, seventeen months out from the vote, is full time election coverage, you need the debates. It’s news of little to no substance that’s easy to report and all the reporters need to do is sit there or watch it on television. What’s better than that? Imagine how excruciating it must be to have to come up with new, readable and watchable stories every day when we’re this far from the big event. Nobody is broadcasting full time coverage of next year’s Summer Olympics yet, are they? There’s a reason.

Here’s the beauty of it, you don’t need to waste your time watching any of them. If something noteworthy happens, you’ll hear about it. Then you can watch it on TiVo or look it up on-line, in print or video. Unless someone is paying you to do so, or you’ve got a masochistic fetish for sound bites, you can just ignore the primary debates completely.

This grotesque panoply of debates is basically pornography to help people fantasize about what life might be like with a different guy in the White House. There is a certain amount of fun to be had following those lines of thought, but I can do it without the porn.