Debates are pointless.
We’ve been told, you and I, that debating is the best way to understand an issue, because you get to hear both sides in an informed sort of way.
Except … at the end of a formal debate, what do the judges do (or, at the end of a presidential or vice-presidential debate, pundits (or polls) do?
They decide who won. Not which position was right. Quite the opposite — the entire premise of the debate format is that both positions are always equally right. All debates do is determine who is the better arguer. It’s intellectual relativism at its finest.
At the end of the presidential and vice-presidential debates, what have we learned? Nothing more about the issues or which of the two debaters would be better in office, unless the office they’re running for is Debater In Chief.
Welcome to my once-every-four years pre-election diatribe, built on the thin pretext that this relates to the business challenge of how you decide who to hire and retain. As with past diatribes I won’t suggest who you should vote for, just how each of us might go about deciding who to vote for.
Thought #1: Be happy. Yes, I think one of the two presidential tickets would be better for this country than the other. But. Whichever ticket is elected, we’ll end up with very smart, very qualified individuals as both president and vice president.
Like him or not, Barack Obama is very smart, and has demonstrated that he reviews evidence and listens to smart, well-informed individuals before making his decisions.
And, like him or not, Mitt Romney has demonstrated throughout his career that whatever else he might be, he’s also a very smart guy who knows how to listen, learn, and get things done.
Also, unlike many past elections, where one or both of the vice-presidential candidates were bad jokes, Joe Biden, for all his gaffes, is intensely knowledgeable, especially about foreign policy; while Paul Ryan is better known for his wonkiness than his charisma.
We have four highly qualified candidates. We should always be so lucky.
Thought #2: From a policy perspective, the election matters little. Whoever is elected, so long as either party holds more than 40% of the seats in the Senate it can block just about everything related to implementing presidential policy. Never mind which party started it. No matter who is elected president, and whichever party has a majority in the House and Senate, we can expect this dynamic to continue.
The only cure I see for this is instant run-off (aka Ranked Choice Voting). Here’s why: Instant run-off allows citizens to vote for the candidate they think is best qualified rather than the major-party candidate they think is best qualified.
In case this point isn’t clear: Voting for the third-party candidate you like best counts as a half vote against whichever major party candidate you’d prefer if your preferred third-party candidate loses.
So instant run-off is what’s needed for third-party candidates to get elected. We’d only need a few of them in the House and Senate for the third party to be the tie-breaker for every vote (and cloture vote). A viable third party might actually break the gridlock.
And no, gridlock isn’t desirable. Change is constant. We need to adapt, our government just as much as businesses and ourselves. Gridlock prevents that.
Thought #3: This time, perhaps party affiliation should be a deciding factor. I’ve never taken this position in the past. I hope I never take it in the future. But given the gridlock issue, and given that the two major parties have behaved very differently in the recent past … not that one or the other is better or worse, but that they have very different flaws … it might make sense to evaluate the candidates based on which of the two parties they’ve decided to lead and be constrained by, and why you think they made that choice.
That, in fact, is how I made my decision this time. I find one of the two parties to be far more consistently detestable than the other, far more than I feel strongly about either presidential candidate. And as the winner’s party, by directing the executive branch, gets much more power, that in itself is a major issue this year.
Thought #4: Vote. Remember, please, that as citizens we aren’t government’s customers, nor are we disinterested spectators. We’re our government’s owners, and as owners we’re responsible for it. Vote.
Enough. Thanks for indulging me. Next week it’s back to business.
At the current burn rate of government spending, “free for all” is hardly appropriate.
Think too how our economy would fare if corporations chose CEO’s the way we do presidential elections (granted, some do, but seldom are those “built to last.”) One key factor in the selection of successful CEO’s is that each has relevant experience.
True, but judging from the results, it’s pretty clear that corporations (overall) don’t exactly have a great track record for correctly identifying relevant experience.
With the structure of the “debates,” I don’t see much of a debate. We have an infomercial pretending to be newsworthy. The parties in the debates refuse to make public the debate contracts. The public is not allowed to see how the process and information is controlled and manipulated to what each party hopes is to their benefit.
Hi Bob,
Nice column, you did a good job disguising who you are really voting for.On your thought number 2, I want to put a little more detail.
You talk about instant runoff voting (ranked choice). While I agree that ranked choice is good, the means to resolve the ranking is actually quite important. Instant runoff is better in some very specific conditions, but is not robust.
There are a few better approaches. Either Condorcet or Approval are bettter, with Borda being pretty good. Our current plurality or first past the post and IRV (or Hare), have very strange behaviors.
See this web page and spend some time to understand it. It’s really fgood work.
http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
Cheers,
Tony
Actually, approval, Borda, Condorcet, and IRV all have significant flaws (though almost anything is better than plurality voting). The one type not mentioned in the link you posted is probably the most foolproof, easiest-to-use system out there – rating. It works like an eBay vendor rating or any other system where the candidate is scored on a simple scale, from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 or whatever. It captures the intensity of the feeling you have for particular candidates and it solves a number of problems found in voting theory (i.e. “dishonest voters”, independence of irrelevant outcomes, etc.).
Debates aren’t just useless. They’re dangerous. All that’s needed to lock up an election is for one candidate to come up with a memorable zinger and it’s game over. When Ronald Reagan told Jimmy Carter, “There you go again” it was the only thing voters remembered. I knew that the election was already over. It could happen again. Terrible way to decide an election.
Oh, I remember that line of Reagan’s all too well.
It got him elected and we all got to enjoy supply side, trickle down economics for the next 30 years.
>>I find one of the two parties to be far more consistently detestable than the other<<
What a great way to put it. Each side can read it perfectly accurately.
Bob,
I think you are quite wrong on point #2. From a policy perspective this debate matters a whole lot. While congress may remain deadlocked, it’s important to keep in mind two things:
1) Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was passed by reconciliation which means it can effectively be repealed with only 51 votes in the Senate
2) Much of the policy implementation is done at the Agency level. Think about the differences in the DOJ, EPA, HHS, CFPB, etc in a Romney Administration or an Obama Administration.
Other than point #2 this was a great column.
“debate” in the first line should read “election”…that’s what happens when I don’t proofread…
I agree on point #2. I’m not sure you’re right about point #1. Versions of the Affordable Care Act were passed by the House and Senate. Reconciliation resolved the differences between the two bills. It isn’t how it was passed in the first place.
And in any event, to be repealed the vote for repeal would have to get out of committee and onto the floor of the Senate. Even if the Democrats lose their majority status in the Senate, they won’t lose so many seats that they couldn’t filibuster this to keep repeal from happening.
Actually, technically, reconciliation didn’t resolve the differences between the House and Senate bills. The Senate passed its version; the House was moving a different version, but when 60-vote control in the Senate was lost (when Scott Brown took his seat), the only option available to the administration was to pass the Senate version “as is” in the House. A separate bill later amended the act, and that bill was passed via the reconciliation process, but “reconciliation” isn’t a means of resolving the difference between House and Senate versions. That’s a conference committee report.
Reconciliation is a process in the Senate by which certain bills can be passed without requiring them to run the filibuster gauntlet. A similar process exists in the House but as the House can limit debate more easily, the process is little-used there.
Is there a voting method that would favor pragmatists over ideologues? Though, right now I would be happy to just get an accurate count. Just like in the days of the first vote tabulating machines, the political realities of our time cannot tolerate an accurate count. There is sufficient fraud in my own city that in each of the last two presidential elections, one of my college age daughters tried to vote late in the day and found that her name had already been voted. Now we all vote in the morning …
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