Televised Democratic debates going awry — so that picket line is perfect

Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Tom Perez was full of optimism earlier this year when he proudly announced the party’s plans for 12 presidential primary “debates.” He figured these television spectaculars would showcase his party’s many presidential contenders in a glowing light, providing a stark contrast to the current White House occupant.

The reality now is that this oversupply of poorly executed televised debates has become a death march, of sorts, diminishing the party’s prospects in 2020.

The next debate will be the sixth in this tiring string of wasted television time. It is scheduled for Thursday evening in Los Angeles. Perez has announced the dates and locations for four more debates in January and February, one in each of the first four caucus and primary states.

This week’s debate is scheduled to be held at Loyola Marymount University but is threatened by labor protests of unionized workers employed by the food service contractor on campus. The seven Democrats qualified for this week’s debate stage have all said they won’t cross a picket line to attend.

The DNC should thank the labor picketers and hope the event is waived off. Otherwise, the Democratic presidential field will subject the nation to another night of boredom, repetitive stump one-liners, self-absorbed moderators and unfair imbalances of candidate speaking time. All of those deficiencies have been on full display through five debates, with no indication the DNC can fix them.

Television debates are non-partisan in their ability to diminish political dialogue. The 2016 Republican debate series was equally as dreadful and unhelpful to the nation in choosing a nominee. Pundits assessed that Trump lost every debate, including the ones he skipped. GOP debate “winners” in 2016 included Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, all of whose candidacies disintegrated.

The so-called winners of the early Democratic television brawls, according to many of the post-debate experts, were at various times Sen. Kamala Harris of California, former HUD secretary and former San Antonio mayor Julian Castro, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, former congressman Beto O’Rourke of Texas, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Only Warren’s campaign is still viable. The candidate most panned by pundits for listless debate performances is former vice president Joe Biden, who happens to maintain a lead in the Real Clear Politics average of national polls. Biden’s supporters apparently, and rightly, don’t see performance in artificial debates as essential for their backing.

Far from generating momentum for the Democrats’ presidential cause, the string of debates has suffered from declining interest as measured by television ratings. The two-night debate festival in June averaged more than 16 million viewers to see 20 candidates. The November debate featured nine qualifying candidates and drew fewer than seven million viewers. Sure, the latest debate happened during a week of House committee impeachment hearings, but that should have sparked interest from voters to check out which Democrat might be the best challenger of a wounded President Trump. The November snoozer was so bad that the big question on social media during the debate was about why Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-Minn.) hair was shaking.

Thursday’s debate, should it happen, would go off without recently declared candidates Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, both of whom might have something to add to the discussion. DNC debate managers clearly didn’t provide for what to do with late-announcing candidates.

Booker, a non-participant for the upcoming debate, is now petitioning the DNC to revise its qualifying rules for the next round. That suggestion is worth strong consideration by the DNC, but it will be hard to shake things up without making it look like the rules are changing in the second half of the game. Such a change in qualification rules would also be a DNC acknowledgement that the confusing rules trotted out earlier this year were a failure.

Television is a terrible venue for reasoned discussion of kitchen-table issues, yet the DNC forged headlong into the glamorous trap that big media outlets set for them. Televised debates serve only to give broadcast outlets a chance to promote themselves and put on spectacles. Far from profiling the best of what candidates have to offer, the politicians are reduced to superficial, cliché-driven, consultant-devised caricatures. The television debate format provides only for sound-bite answers, devoid of nuance.

Instead of wasting time with debate preparation for the fake world of television, the wise Democratic presidential candidates should skip all of the upcoming debates and continue meeting voters on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire. Of course, none has the guts to really do that. The labor protesters in Los Angeles, thus, could be doing the candidates and the nation a huge favor if their activism leads to the cancellation of Thursday’s debate.

Jeffrey McCall is a media critic and professor of communication at DePauw University. He has worked as a radio news director, a newspaper reporter and as a political media consultant. Follow him on Twitter @Prof_McCall.