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Thursday, August 14, 2003

Recall debate 

Posted by Hei Lun : 6:53 PM

A debate is scheduled for September 17. Any candidate who polls 10% in at least one of the three major polls before 9/5 will be invited (with a minimum of six candidates), and Grey Davis will have a taped message played during the debate. Daniel Weintraub also reports that the debate questions will be published in advance, which he thinks is a good idea:

First, in a traditional debate, the candidates have a pretty good idea anyway of what questions they will be asked. They prep for them endlessly with their staff and often provide canned responses that are safe and unenlightening. One reason they get away with that, ironically, is the pretense by all involved that the questions are actually a surprise and the answers spontaneous. Thus, the expectations for their responses are fairly low. If the candidates knew what questions were coming, and we knew they knew, voters might actually expect them to answer with a little more substance. That’s what competitive debaters do in real debates, by the way.

But there’s more. The idea of a political debate isn’t just to have the candidates sparring among themselves. It’s to have voters watch, be interested and talk about it. If the questions were widely circulated say, a week ahead of time, on television, in the newspapers, and on the Internet, it’s even possible that some of the queries could work their way into conversations people are having about the race, in person and on the web. People might talk about how they expect this or that candidate to answer, and what kind of answer they would be looking for. With any luck, an enterprising newspaper might publish background stories related to the questions to help novices better understand the topic. Or maybe the web might generate such material.
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