Debating on television
Mitt Romney should be well off the polling pace in this whole American presidential extravaganza. In the Department of Derailing Gaffes, that video tape of him telling a room full of fat cats that 47% of Americans are deadbeats should rank just below telling the country you want to tax cake.But President Obama wouldn't, or couldn't, attack Romney for those "47%" comments during the debate last night because the same group of donors Romney was pandering to in that ballroom speech is the same group of donors the Democrats want to proposition tomorrow.
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The biggest embarrassment that moderator Jim Lehrer should be feeling this morning is not over being pushed and shoved around on live TV by Mitt Romney, but that he was chosen at all to be the debate moderator. Like the political conventions, these side-by-side interviews that the media refers to as debates are commercials for the two dominant parties. Long gone are the days when citizen groups like the League of Women Voters sponsored the televised debates and third-party candidates could earn, through polling traction, a place on the stage.
Republicans and Democrats joined forces in 1988 to create something called the Commission on Presidential Debates to help keep competing parties out of the equation. (Ralph Nader was excluded from the debates in both 2000 and 2004 despite solid majorities of Americans in those election years telling pollsters they believed he should be in them.) Today, America's largest corporations rush to be the debate "sponsors" instead, throwing money at both parties and the process in an effort to appear civic-minded. They throw hospitality parties on the scene, where the reporters you see previewing and recapping the debate on television eat and drink for free.
The Commission on Presidential Debates may be the single largest obstacle in the United States to the potential political success of the political parties outside the oligarchy. There is almost a 100% positive co-relationship between a candidate being allowed to participate in a nationally-televised debate and that candidate being viewed as "viable" by the voters and the media.
So it goes without saying that it cannot be allowed to happen. The Center for Public Integrity has called the commission "a secretive tax-exempt organization," and in 2008, that group uncovered that 93% of the contributions to the non-profit commission had come from just six donors, the names of which were blacked out on a financial statement provided to CPI. Though the D.C. Circuit Court rejected a lawsuit brought by Nader in 2000, it remains to be seen how a commission empowered by Congress can exclude candidates that are constitutionally-eligible to be on the ballot.
And as for Jim Lehrer, when this commission that's only been comprised at any given time of Democrat and Republican party hacks chooses you to moderate such a staged event, they're really just telling you that they trust you not to go off script or pose a question that might embarrass one candidate or both. Not a reputation I would think a journalist would want to have, but then they keep lining up for the assignment.
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Romney's lying last night was savage. Even some of his opinion statements were dishonest. At one point, he claimed that preventing future generations of Americans from inheriting a massive budget deficit was a "moral" issue for him. This is a man with a $200 million net worth that brags about paying a 14% tax rate. So I don't believe him.
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Imagine you go to the Musee du Louvre in Paris. Are you imagining along with me? You proceed into the palace in search of Leonardo da Vinci's master work on canvas, the Mona Lisa. As you cast your eyes upon it, you discover that someone has scissored off roughly the top quarter section of the painting.. say, from the very top down to right around eyebrow level. That emotion you're now feeling in your imaginations is what I feel when I hear a radio station play Stevie Wonder's "Do I Do" and they cut off the Dizzy Gillespie part.
posted by CM @ 9:40 PM
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