This news from Time magazine online reinforces what Viewpoint suggested Thursday night about the creeping sense of fatalism among Kerry supporters:
Other polls have the race much closer but a double-digit lead has to be giving the Kerry team heartburn. What do they do to reverse it at this point? They have two hopes. They can hope that something bad happens in the war or to the economy, hopes so ignoble that they would never dream of admitting to them, or they can hope that Kerry will devastate Bush in the debates.
This latter hope is realistic, but it shouldn't be. In Viewpoint's opinion presidential debates serve no useful purpose. They are a waste of time and resources in almost any election season but especially in this one. No one who has been paying attention is going to be swayed by what they hear and anyone who hasn't been paying attention to this campaign by now shouldn't vote in November anyway.
Both of this year's candidates have extensive records which are far more reliable predictors of what they would do as president than anything they say in a debate. Moreover, a good debate performance is no indicator at all as to what kind of president a man would be. We don't elect a debater-in-chief, we elect a commander-in-chief. A man may be an excellent debater but a terrible leader.
Presidential debates do not promote the national interest, they only cater to the media's appetite for attention. They give the narcissists in the elite media an opportunity to enhance their own sense of self-importance, but beyond that they accomplish almost nothing other than to provide an opportunity for one candidate or the other to get off a zinger at the expense of his opponent. Certainly they are not sincere attempts to learn the truth about the candidates. They are all about image and style, and scarcely at all about real substance. To get at the substance of a candidate we need only consult his record and the media can display that without the irrelevant trappings of a mano a mano gladiatorial contest.
Almost none of what is memorable from past debates tells us anything of importance about the candidates involved. Richard Nixon had five o'clock shadow. Gerald Ford "liberated" Poland. Reagan admonished Carter, "There you go again". Lloyd Bentson scorched Dan Quayle with, "You're no John Kennedy". George H.W. Bush glanced wearily at his watch. These are the things that the media found infinitely fascinating and worth going to the trouble and expense of having a national debate in order to witness and talk about, but none of them had any relevance at all to the question of whether the candidate deserved our vote.
The only image from any debate that revealed anything of importance to voters was when Al Gore stomped across the stage to hover menacingly above George W. Bush while Bush responded to a question. That bit of buffoonery announced to the world that Gore was a nitwit. Other than that debates have never revealed anything useful.
Even so, the media will insist that we undergo the ordeal so that the 5% of undecided citizens who have been living in a cave somewhere for the last three years can have one last chance to closely scrutinize the candidates. All this flummery for people who don't care, who probably won't vote anyway, and if they do, will doubtless base their vote on which candidate is cutest, is pretty hard to justify.