The quality of debates among America’s national candidates has plummeted—and the media must share the blame.
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The GOP debates have turned into performance art. They demean our electoral process, but many in the national media are backing away from facts and probity and enabling the worst candidates in their effort to corner the attention market.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Working the Refs
I watched the Republican primary debate last night, and at first, I had no real intention of writing again about a process that is now a national embarrassment. But when it was over, I couldn’t shake the thought of how far America has come over the past few decades—and how far down our politics have fallen.
I will not criticize Nikki Haley for calling Vivek Ramaswamy “scum” last night. Ramaswamy tried to pull Haley’s daughter into the debate, and I applaud her for speaking up with such clarity. I’ve sat here many times trying to describe Ramaswamy while poring over my inventory of multisyllabic words—obnoxious, execrable, insufferable—and the former UN ambassador beat me to it with a legitimate punch that clearly came out of justified disgust.
But after Haley dispensed with Ramaswamy, my mind wandered back to an earlier era, and to other debates. I had a sudden sense of the swift passage of time, the disorienting recognition of how much has changed over the years.
I was thinking, in particular, of 1988.
In 1988, I was 27, and keenly interested in politics after working in Washington, D.C., and spending two years for the Massachusetts House of Representatives in Boston as a legislative assistant. (Eventually, I would go on to do a year in the U.S. Senate.) That fall, I was back in New England to do some research for my doctoral dissertation, but I was closely following the national presidential election between George H. W. Bush and Mike Dukakis, and I wasn’t going to miss the vice-presidential debate between Republican Dan Quayle and Democrat Lloyd Bentsen.
I raise this bit of nostalgia to remind all of us of Bentsen’s immortal zinger against Quayle during that debate, how nasty it seemed at the time, and how quaint it all seems now.
Quayle was 41, and had served in Congress for nearly 12 years. Today—compared with presidential hopefuls such as Democrat Dean Phillips or Republican Tim Scott, or even compared with Barack Obama in 2008—Quayle might seem qualified to run for a national spot. But in those days, Quayle’s youth, boyish looks, and inept off-the-cuff moments all opened the door for questions about his qualifications.
Quayle was asked what he would do if he had to assume the presidency. He flailed around, stammering about prayers and Cabinet meetings and his time in Congress. When the moderator, Tom Brokaw, came back to the question, Quayle apparently felt he was being slammed for inexperience, and so he compared himself to John F. Kennedy: “I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency.”
And that’s when Bentsen turned the key on his nuclear response:
Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.
Quayle, with a look both of hurt and anger, turned to Bentsen and said: “That was really uncalled for, senator.”
Watching in real time, I felt embarrassed for Quayle and mad at Bentsen. It was stupid of Quayle to invoke Kennedy, not least because he should have known that any mention of JFK would set up Bentsen’s cheap ambush (one, it turns out, Bentsen had prepared in advance). But to the credit of both men, this throat-punch was only one moment in what was otherwise a real debate between serious politicians.
Fast-forward to 2023. The front-runner for the nomination, Donald Trump, hasn’t bothered to show up for any of the debates so far. The GOP primary stage—showcasing competitors not for the No. 2 spot but for the job of commander in chief—was populated by a senator whose insubstantial campaign has failed to gain traction but who finally made news last night by appearing in public with a girlfriend; a governor whose unsteady campaign has been weighed down by culture warring, aloofness, and his inability to seem comfortable in his own skin; two other former governors who earlier bent their knees to Trump; and Vivek Ramaswamy, who unfortunately is still Vivek Ramaswamy. It was an utterly unserious business.
Why is this happening? Part of the reason is the structural lock Trump now has on the nomination, which relieves the candidates of the burden of being taken too seriously. At this point, he could lose half his supporters and still win. But another reason is the way the media insists on treating this election as just another contest between normal politicians, a problem that was on full display last night in Miami.
In fairness to the NBC journalists Lester Holt and Kristen Welker, last night was a more orderly affair than the previous free-for-all. (Hugh Hewitt was also there. I’ll get to him.) But the questions were out of some pre-Trump-era playbook, old-school stuff about the economy and foreign policy—and nothing about the likely winner of the primary, his multiple criminal indictments, or his plans to undermine American democracy on his first day.
Instead, Haley and Chris Christie and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gamely went through their talking points. Scott, for his part, seemed to be running for the presidency of a Bible college. Ramaswamy, as usual, engaged in one inanity after another, both showcasing his ignorance of issues (the moderators let him get away with some flagrant errors, including one about Tuesday’s vote on abortion rights in Ohio) and reinforcing his commitment to gaining followers from fans of Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk.
Hewitt, a conservative talk-radio host and Trump enabler, tried to make the Republican Party seem like a normal political organization by asking wonky questions, including one about how many ships the U.S. Navy should have, as if this were one of the issues that created a 40-point gulf between Trump and the rest of the field.
Hewitt is a GOP partisan and he knew what he was doing, and too many in the national media are following the same path because they are in the grip of a normalcy bias, the conviction that things aren’t really that different than they were before and that they won’t change that dramatically in the future. As Margaret Sullivan wrote today in The Guardian, the media should be communicating the stakes of this election to the public. But alas.
Instead, journalists have emphasized Joe Biden’s age and Trump’s “freewheeling” style. They blame the public’s attitudes on “polarization”, as if they themselves have no role. And, of course, they make the election about the horse race—rather than what would happen a few lengths after the finish line.
This commitment to a false neutrality is why journalists have to nod politely while a Trump or a Ramaswamy (or, on the other side, a Marianne Williamson, who is running again) says incomprehensible things onstage. To call candidates to account for being ridiculous or offensive would lead to charges of bias and partisanship.
The media—like the Democrats, unfortunately—seem to have internalized right-wing criticisms about them. Last night showed yet again that the refs have been worked. And we might all pay the price next year.
Related:
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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
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