A World Class Idea

Starting in June, qualifying candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination will engage in a series of twelve "debates" - six in 2019, six more in the early months of 2020.  The rules for qualifying are fairly generous.  A dozen candidates had qualified by late March, so figure at least sixteen will make the cut before things get under way.

Since there will be so many candidates, the Democratic National Committee has decided to split the field for the first "debate" into two consecutive nights, using a random process to assure that one debate will not feature the leading candidates and the other relative unknowns.

All of this sounds relatively fair - as though the DNC were trying to make up for leaning so heavily in favor of their preferred candidate in 2016.  But making things fair doesn't mean making them sensible - and these so-called "debates", with each night featuring seven or more candidates in a desperate struggle to impress, make absolutely no sense.  They are, at best, joint press conferences.

At worst, as the Republican version proved in 2016, they tend to favor the loudest, most aggressive, least nuanced speakers, rather than those who make the best, most reasoned arguments. 

What mass debates absolutely cannot do is inform potential Democratic primary voters and caucus-goers how well their eventual choice might perform in October, 2020, in a one-on-one confrontation with the Republican nominee.  Which, one would think, would be a consideration.

Now, there is no particular reason to expect the DNC to develop a process that makes sense.  This is, after all, the same DNC that found a way to lose the White House to Donald Trump - a thing most knowledgeable folks considered an impossibility until it actually happened.  

But really, given that thirty months have elapsed since the disaster of 2016, you'd think the DNC might have come up with something better than these tedious, uninformative cattle-calls they insist on calling "debates".

Especially since, in 2018, basically the entire planet - including the US - experienced the phenomenon called The World Cup, which uses a rather brilliant method to narrow a large field of contenders into a smaller one, while giving each contender a chance to play itself into the second round.

Now, as there are about seven billion people better able to explain the World Cup than I am, I'm not going to do that here.  I'd probably get some details wrong, and wind up having to apologize endlessly to readers who actually give a damn about soccer (or football) - a game played during the time of year when real men (I don't presume to speak for real women) are watching baseball. 

But the basic idea of the World Cup's first round - translated into terms of the Democratic nomination contest - might go like this.  

By a random process, the DNC would divide the field of qualifying candidates into groups of four (or five).  During the summer of 2019, each group would get together for a designated period (perhaps a week) and - over the course of that period - each member of the group would debate each other member, one-on-one, for 90 minutes.  The rules would be derived from those used in recent presidential contests.

Once all of the groups had completed their round-robin debates, the DNC would make all of these  debates available online, so that those interested could watch them when and as (and as often as) they chose.  [Note to DNC:  The technology for this actually exists.  I'm pretty sure.]

By hosting a series of round-robin, one-on-one debates, the DNC would thus give each candidate a chance to show what she or he can do against a single opponent - responding to valid points, defending their positions, matching wits - rather than posturing, interrupting, grimacing and gesticulating in order to get attention.  

That, alone, should justify going to a round-robin format, but there are other good reasons for doing so.

For one thing, while placing seven or eight candidates on a stage necessarily gives some a distinct positional advantage, placing two candidates on a stage can be completely fair.

Moreover, because two reasonably intelligent candidates could, to a certain extent, exchange ideas without the interference of a moderator, the role of that moderator should be significantly reduced.

Most of all, by using this process, the candidate who eventually wins the Democratic nomination would have gotten a good deal of practice at the sort of high-stakes, face-to-face confrontation that he or she will have with Donald Trump in the fall of 2020.

Which makes perfect sense.  Why not use a debate format which assures that the eventual Democratic nominee gets the gig, at least in part, by performing in the same sort of debate she or he will have to face in the actual election campaign?

If you think about it, the present format - by which the party's nomination will be decided, in significant part, through a unique procedure unrelated to anything that will occur in the fall campaign, is simply bizarre.  It makes about as much sense as - I don't know...

as deciding who breaks a tie in a sporting event which features fast-moving team play, by having one player at a time try to kick a ball from a fixed position past a goalie who knows it's coming.

And who would ever come up with a rule like that?