Who cares about debate prep? The press, sadly, seems to depict debate
prep as about pretty much nothing but preparing one-liners, put-downs,
and elegant evasions. And yet debate preparation for a president or a
presidential candidate has an important substantive and systemic
function, as it requires the principal to listen to and to read
briefings on a range of important and difficult policy matters, to try
formulating sensible and persuasive responses, and to hear those responses
criticized by smart aides -- forcing the candidate or president to try
again--and to think again. In a fine book called the Fourth Branch of
Government, Douglass Cater wrote, many years ago, that a presidential
press conference has the beneficial effect not only of providing an
occasion for presidential communication, but also as requiring the
president and crucially the presidential staff to see to it that they
had a grasp of everything that was happening in the administration, so
as not to be surprised. Without such occasions, the temptation of
subordinates to hide bad news from the principal is strong. Debate
preparation matters -- as a function of self government.
If Donald Trump does not bother to prepare for the current round of presidential debates but instead treats them as an occasion for extemporaneous mud-slinging and lies, what does that predict about how a Trump presidency might unfold?
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2 comments:
Why DOES debate prep matter? You've described the reasons well. The problem in US format Presidential style elections is that the candidates (in this case Trump) lack the intellectual capacity, the educational sophistication or even the native curiosity to prepare. And, the US citizenry allows the candidates to get away with that. Consider every other election in every other liberal state. The candidates are excoriated by the public is they fail to present cogent positions. In the last UK election, Ms. May will likely have lost her position as PM because she failed to prepare. No other state allows what happened in the US. None of them. So, why do US citizens set the bar so low when so much is at stake??
And part of the function of debates, campaigns, and press conferences is for the President to do his or her best to persuade the public -- and to open the president's position to debate and opposition. These, too, are essential functions of a democracy.
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