by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
There's a growing meme that Wolf Blitzer's Russert-lite performance as debate moderator was a bit too over the top. Perhaps, but journalists adopt this hectoring pose for a reason: good politicians are very skilled at evading direct questions. It's natural to respond to the standard dodge-reframe-recite-talking-points mantra by at least repeating the original question and hoping to pin the candidate down for an answer. Blitzer tried this at a previous debate, and I thought it worked quite well; it made it very obvious when candidates had failed to answer the question, and it gave them another opportunity to respond directly.
The root cause of the subpar debate experience, then, is not that Blitzer pressed candidates (though I think pressing more than twice becomes overkill); it's that he had really crappy questions, particularly the drivers' license exchange which has very little to do with the overall question of what the U.S. ought to do about the increased immigration. The format is at its worst when journalists select all their questions on the basis of whether they will put the candidate on the wrong side of public opinion or how much they will embarrass them with tangential transparency/appearance-of-impropriety issues that are very small in scope.
So in light of Kevin Drum's suggestion, let's try these for debate rules:
