Watched the debate last night. I think you all know where I stand vis-a-vis the election, so I won’t go into all that.
But I did want to complain about Tom Brokaw and his incessant whining about the time. I realize that they have to deal with TV schedules, etc., and that the networks are all giving up time for the debates, but the debates are the only time these two people, one of whom will end up being president, will ever face each other and answer questions. They really need to do away with the time limit thing as a whole. It’s in the candidate’s interest to make their point concisely, for we as a culture seem to despise people who are long-winded. So hearing Tom chirp in that “Oh, that was longer than a minute”,”Did you know we have lights all throughout this room with yellow and green and red”, is really kind of annoying. One of them is going to be president. It’s kind of an important job interview. If the guy wants to take an extra 15 seconds, give it to him, rather than moan about how they went over a minute, which, incidentally, wasted time.
I’m just saying that when crises develop during the next administration, no one is going to be waiting in the wings with a stopwatch saying, “Hurry, Mr. President, you’ve been at this for 2 minutes.”
On a side note, the last question of the night was so Rumsfeld-ian. “What don’t you know and how will you go about knowing it?” or whatever it was. It really made it seem as though they were going to respond, “There are known knowns, that is, there are things we know we know. There are known unknowns, that is to say that there are things we know we do not know. And then there are unknown unknowns, which are things that we do not know that we don’t know…. etc…” That question really belonged in the Stephanopolous debate alongside “Why aren’t you wearing a flag pin?”, “Don’t you love America?”, “Do you think you’d be an OK commander-in-chief?” It seems like such a shame to ask such an open-ended question (the “what don’t you know, etc.”). It’s really about the equivalent of Tom turning to the two of them and saying, “OK, we’ll take your closing statements now.”
These debates seem to be very strange. Jim Lehrer seemed intent on having them talk directly to each other (”Tell him that”, etc.), Gwen Ifill, who I think is great, was completely shut out of the VP debate (”I’m not going to answer the questions the moderator poses”), and Tom Brokaw seemed obsessed with keeping track of time. I wonder what Bob Schieffer has in store for us. I’m hoping it’s Pictionary.
