HOME / politics: Who's winning, who's losing, and why.

Sit Down and Shut UpHow Bob Schieffer can make this year's final debate interesting.

By Jeff GreenfieldPosted Monday, Oct. 13, 2008, at 4:58 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

RSS

Quite apart from format, such an approach suggests a third element critical for a good debate:

Encourage the moderator to be assertive, even aggressive, without time limits.

Some of the best political debates I've seen were moderated by veteran New York newsman Gabe Pressman. On the Sunday before an election, Pressman would sit down in an informal setting, armed only with a stopwatch to ensure roughly equal time. There were no time limits, no rigidly structured turn-taking, and if Pressman wasn't satisfied with an answer, he'd ask the question again. Schieffer has already indicated his intention to push for more specific answers ... and this intention will be of particular significance if he is willing to adopt a more provocative role:

If there's an elephant in the room, ask about it.

It's always safe for a moderator to confine himself to "issue" questions, but the result is often a joint recitation of masticated chunks of phrases. Some of the best debate questions are of a very different sort. When CNN's Bernard Shaw asked Michael Dukakis in 1988 if he would favor "an irrevocable death penalty for the killer" if his wife were raped an murdered, Dukakis' ice-water chilly response was a perfect entry into who he was. Another candidate—Bill Clinton or Mario Cuomo, for instance—might have said: "I'd want to kill the bastard myself. But suppose in my rage I wound up going after the wrong person?" That same year, ABC's Peter Jennings began an earlier debate by asking Dukakis to respond to the idea that he was passionless. The candidate's answer was ... passionless.

This coming debate is ripe for such "impolite" inquiries:

"Senator McCain, one of your conservative Republican colleagues in the Senate, Thad Cochran, said about you, 'The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine.' The former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party said, 'Do I trust him with the button? No.' These folks on your side of the aisle aren't talking about political disputes—they're saying you don't have the temperament to be president. Shouldn't that bother voters?"

"Senator Obama, you spent 20 years in a church whose pastor—a pastor you repeatedly embraced and praised—called America inherently racist, embraced Louis Farrakhan, and spread paranoid tales about the government creating AIDS. You worked—a lot more closely than you originally described—with a man who tried to blow up federal buildings and to this day calls himself revolutionary. Why are you comfortable associating yourself with people with such a hostile view of the country you want to lead?"

And finally, if all else fails ...

Take the Phil Donahue "sayonara" route.

In 1992, Bill Clinton and former California Gov. Jerry Brown met on The Phil Donahue Show for a debate. Donahue introduced the contenders—and then left the stage, leaving the candidates, as "Coffee Talk's" Linda Richman might have put it, to "talk amongst yourselves." It was one of the more bracing political debates, especially when Clinton, angered by Brown's attack on Hillary Clinton's law firm work, put a finger in Brown's face and told him, "You ought to be ashamed." The only more satisfying event would have been for Clinton to punch Brown to the floor—thus depriving analysts of their favorite cliché cop-out: "There were no knockdowns."