Good morning. Today’s Morning Jolt will try really, really hard to skip over juvenile jokes about Jeffrey Toobin. On the menu today: The Commission on Presidential Debates decrees that the microphones will be muted for candidates during the opponent’s time, the huge divide between the politically engaged and the politically unengaged, a series of thanks, and Greg Corombos and I get metaphorically stuck in a walk-in freezer.
In Thursday’s Debate, the Microphones Will Be Muted
The Commission on Presidential Debates announced that “President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden will have their microphones muted during Thursday’s presidential debate to ensure each candidate can get his points across uninterrupted.”
Even before this latest decision, Trump’s campaign manager was calling them the “Biden Debate Commission,” and earlier this month, former GOP nominee Bob Dole contended, “The Commission on Presidential Debates is supposedly bipartisan with an equal number of Republicans and Democrats. I know all of the Republicans and most are friends of mine. I am concerned that none of them support Donald Trump. A biased debate commission is unfair.”
You may recall Frank Fahrenkopf, chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, insisting that moderator Steve Scully’s Twitter account was hacked; days later, Scully admitted his account had not been hacked.
In an era where every old respected institution in American life seems to be crumbling before our eyes, the Commission on Presidential Debates is strangely impregnable. No one elected them. Few Americans know them. Even most political junkies couldn’t name who’s on the commission. And yet, they more or less decree the rules for the presidential debate every four years, and other than Trump, no candidate really wants to cross them. When wildly popular podcasting star Joe Rogan proposed hosting a debate on his program — no audience, going on for hours, just the two candidates and the host, few major figures in the political firmament took it seriously. (Trump said he was game.)
There is no equivalently powerful institution that manages the primary debates, and thus we’ve seen a lot more debates in primary season.
Back in the 2008 cycle, the Democratic Party had 26 presidential debates and “forums” where multiple candidates appeared. That cycle the Republicans had 21; four years later, Republicans had another 20. The respective party committees didn’t want to have so many debates and forums where the candidates appeared on the same stage, one after another, but for a while neither the campaigns, nor the television networks, nor the sponsoring organizations cared. Lesser-known candidates needed every opportunity they could get, and the networks liked the ratings. Eventually the party committee was able to restore a bit of its own authority, threatening to sanction candidates who participated in “unauthorized” debates, and limiting the process to just six primary debates — a move that many Bernie Sanders fans interpreted as an attempt to help Hillary Clinton. This cycle, Democrats had “only” eleven debates.
In the past few cycles, primary debates have multiplied like rabbits, while the general-election debates have remained pretty much the same: three presidential debates, one vice-presidential debate, with one of the evenings featuring a “town hall” style questions from “ordinary Americans” who allegedly are not pulling for one candidate or another. The moderators are usually news anchors well into distinguished careers. The only time an independent or minor-party candidate has been invited was H. Ross Perot and Admiral James Stockdale in 1992.
The questions are usually predictable and generic, the answers have usually been focus-group-tested to the point of terminal blandness. As I noted earlier this year, “many voters and members of the media seem to think caring about a problem — or more specifically, appearing to care about a problem — is the same as having a workable plan to solve a problem. They mistake the destination for the path.” The moderators rarely follow up or press hard for details. No one breaks out the calculators to make sure the proposed numbers add up.
Would Joe Rogan help create a more edifying and interesting debate? Lawrence Wright? Tim Ferriss? Arthur Brooks? How about Fed chairman Jerome Powell? How about retired generals or diplomats asking about the military and geopolitical problems they see lurking on the horizon? They used to have panels of three or four journalists asking questions, why not multiple questioners? How about the commissioner of the Social Security Administration giving a quick update on the latest numbers, and then asking the candidates how they intend to address the future shortfall?
The Commission on Presidential Debates keeps the debates this way the because the candidates largely want them to be this way — safe, predictable, barely scratching the surface of complicated problems and complex topics.
Please note we are halfway through the Jolt and have not yet made any juvenile jokes about Jeffrey Toobin.
The Most Annoying Partisan You Know Is Not Necessarily Representative
Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan teach political science at Stony Brook University, and in today’s New York Times, they argue that the biggest divide in America is not between the left and the right, but between the tuned-in and the tuned-out:
What’s really fascinating is that tuned-in Democrats worry about different topics than tuned-out Democrats, and the same phenomenon is at work among tuned-in and tuned-out Republicans.
On a number of other issues, we found that Americans fall much less neatly into partisan camps. For example, Democrats and Republicans who don’t follow politics closely believe that low hourly wages are one of the most important problems facing the country. But for hard partisans, the issue barely registers.
Partisan Republicans were most likely to say drug abuse was the most important problem facing the country. But less-attentive Republicans ranked it second to last, and they were also concerned about the deficit and divisions between Democrats and Republicans.
Among Democrats, the political junkies think the influence of wealthy donors and interest groups is an urgent problems. But less-attentive Democrats are 25 percentage points more likely to name moral decline as an important problem facing the country — a problem partisan Democrats never even mention.
A wiser and sharper political figure could come up with a way to capitalize on that. If you were an ambitious Democrat, you might focus your public remarks on “moral decline,” and not only give less-engaged Democrats a reason to get excited, you might turn some heads among the Republicans, too. The quasi-populist tone of the likes of Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley would lend itself well to a focus on increasing hourly wages as an explicit goal of economic policy.
The authors also note, “This gap between the politically indifferent and hard, loud partisans exacerbates the perception of a hopeless division in American politics because it is the partisans who define what it means to engage in politics. When a Democrat imagines a Republican, she is not imagining a co-worker who mostly posts cat pictures and happens to vote differently; she is more likely imagining a co-worker she had to mute on Facebook because the Trump posts became too hard to bear.”
We are nearly through the Jolt and have not yet made any juvenile jokes about Jeffrey Toobin.
ADDENDA: If you missed yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, the ten-year anniversary of the show, you missed the equivalent of an old sitcom where Greg and I accidentally get stuck in a walk-in freezer and reminisce about all of our greatest hits over the past decade: our pitch for an HGTV show called Greg and Jim Have No Strong Feelings about Interior Decorating, William F. Buckley’s presence at the 2004 National Conservative Writer Draft, our attack ads the week of the Bears-Jets game, and of course, Disney’s CTU.
. . . Thanks to everyone who preordered Hunting Four Horsemen yesterday. I am humbled by your faith that it is worth reading. Then again, if you’re not sure, Between Two Scorpions is just $3.99 on Kindle, and if you like that, you’ll probably like the next one.
. . . Okay. Let’s just say that you were writing a satirical novel. You create a character who’s a well-known legal analyst on a cable-news network and who writes for The New Yorker, married, and who has an affair that results in some pretty sordid personal drama with his colleagues. Your legal analyst gets dragged into court to pay child support. But somehow all this mess doesn’t really interfere with his thriving television journalism career.
And then you write that during a Zoom call with New Yorker magazine colleagues, this legal analyst . . . seems to get bored and take matters into his own hands, so to speak, while everyone else on the call can see what he’s doing. Imagine that in a one-liner that strains credulity, your imaginary legal analyst declares, “I thought I had muted the Zoom video,” as if the real problem was the audio quality.
If you wrote all that, wouldn’t some editor at the publisher conclude, “naming that character ‘Toobin,’ is a little on-the-nose, don’t you think?”