Do political debates any longer matter?
That would depend on the nature of the debate. The debate
Americans most often think of when the word “debate” is mentioned is the famous
Lincoln/Douglas debates in 1858. Note the plural; the debates were held in
seven Illinois towns. The remarks of the debaters were transcribed by
stenographers and printed nearly in full in various newspapers.
Since her elevation to a possible presidency, Kamala Harris
has sedulously avoided a public exposure she could not easily manipulate. Media
interrogations have been few, and only one debate has been scheduled.
The Lincoln/Douglas debates occurred when American
journalism was just hitting its stride.
There were at the time Republican and Democrat papers – and, helpfully,
no Facebook or Twitter eruptions.
Journalistic partisanship was shameless and unabashed.
Nowadays, partisanship is tucked away into the dark recesses of media stories. Consistent
views of media bias show that a preponderance of reporters and editors lean to
the left. The internet, a refreshing oasis of contrary opinion, appears to be
stoutly contrarian. The managers of the larger internet outposts – Facebook is
a case in point -- are highly selective in what they choose to feature on their
sites.
Free internet access to major press outlets is becoming exceedingly
rare. Everyone, including press publishers, wants to make at the margin enough
in profits to sustain their print publications, and so access to major press
outlets now requires the payment of a viewer’s fee. Print media is shrinking
and, because profit is the mother’s milk of publication, much of what appears
in the legacy media is unavailable to those who decline to subscribe to leading
papers. The architecture of journalism has changed considerably since the
Lincoln/Douglas years, not always for the better. In the current political
environment, it is much easier to – Lincoln’s words – “fool most of the people
most of the time.”
Among politicians, debates are not wanted if unneeded. That
is the lesson we should draw from President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign against
former President Donald Trump. Biden, it will be recalled, avoided media
detection assiduously by, his critics said, “hiding in his basement” and
offering up huge dollops of political fluff, much of it designed to showcase
Biden as a “moderate Democrat.” His
successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, has cribbed leaves from Biden’s
playbook.
Campaigning for office in the modern period has rarely been
the same as governing while in office. President Biden, once installed in the
White House, became a raging, foaming-at-the-mouth progressive. To say he spent
tax money like a drunken sailor, giving a lift to a cumulative inflation rate
of 20% -- some say the figure is higher – is an unjust slur on drunken sailors.
No one in the progressive Democrat Party, certainly none of the all Democrat
members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, seems overly concerned
with spending, and one searches in vain for any mention of serious, long term
spending cuts.
Biden’s conspicuous debate failure against Trump rattled the
confidence of Democrats to such an extent that party leaders – former President
Barrack Obama, leader of the US Senate Chuck Schumer, former Speaker of the US
House Nancy Pelosi, and prominent media heads – none too gently shoved Biden out
of the Democrat Party plane. It was a collective shove administered by the
lights of the national Democrat Party, some of whom, Pelosi conspicuous among
them, later suggested that Biden’s “heroic” decision to forgo reelection to the
presidency had earned him a place on Mount Rushmore.
Biden’s debate failure was owing to his increasingly visible
frailties, some of them medical. Harris is not frail. But she is relying on the
same cloak of invisibility, and the same fluffy, content free campaign
presentation.
Republicans are quick to point out there are no policy
prescriptions on Harris’ political site.
And, of course, the Democrat Nominating Convention was free of domestic
and foreign policy platform positions, the whole mess of political pottage
bubbling with visionary political and cultural change-for-change-sake reforms.
The soft spot in the Democrat Party armor is an overreliance
on contradictory positions. In some cases the contradictions have been softened
through improvised retrenchment. Once in favor of fracking restrictions, Harris
has now repudiated her past contempt for fracking. Her prior positions concerning
the supply of energy were calibrated to cause the least concern to
environmental extremists.
And, of course, there are indissoluble differences between
progressives and conservatives. Progressives believe that an ever increasing
progressive tax current should flow from tax payers to Washington DC,
thereafter to be distributed by an army of bureaucrats to groups that can best
reelect Democrat incumbents or promising progressives. Conservatives regard the
trip as unnecessarily expensive and counterproductive, however politically
expedient it may be.
The needy can most efficiently be helped through a negative income tax – see Milton
Freedman, and do not fail to notice the primitive non-inflation figures in his
discussion with Bill Buckley – that would provide relief directly to the poor,
avoiding both the administrative cost of the tax transit to Washington and back
to the states, the political corruption nestled in the dark corridors of
administrative complexity, and induced inflationary producing over-taxation or,
as progressives prefer to label their tax heists, budget surpluses.
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