Let’s not call it a debate.
Not only were the discrepancies between the
candidates rather few and far between but no candidate spoke for more than ten
and a half minutes. In short, and I mean very short, Donald Trump stumbled his
way through a mediocre GCOM 101 presentation, minus the power point.
After him, Jeb spoke for 8:33. Everyone else on the
primary stage spoke for six and a half minutes tops.
As a teacher, I felt like I was watching a Socratic
seminar where none of the students have read the book and utter buzzwords they
located on SparkNotes and Shmoop. And, when their cheat sheets failed them, the
candidates simply made shit up.
Debates? These were more like drama auditions for
roles in Patton and High Noon. You know, to be leaders in a
world and a nation that no longer exist. And that’s what was so strange about
the debate: from the specific questions to the general topics, everything
seemed anchored in the past.
Towards the end, when Dr. Ben Carson’s description
of all the things he’d done with brains started to make him sound a bit like
Dr. Frankenstein, he concluded with a statement about race that boiled down to:
it’s what’s on the inside that counts. Afterwards, he was praised by pundits
for this statement as if he had just uttered something as profound as Martin Luther
King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” But this was Sunday School simple grasping at
straws.
Ideas? Solutions? Not many. But how could there be?
The problems the nation faces were rarely identified correctly. When speaking
of the Middle East, most of the candidates seemed to conflate ISIS and Iran as
the same challenge. But they’re not.
And that’s the real problem with calling Thursday night's preacher’s tent of snake and oil salesmen a debate. How do you flesh out real answers in
less time than it takes to use a search engine, when the number of people lined
up to use the keyboard outnumbers the entries in an NCAA Tournament bracket?
The answer is you don’t. And the only real argument
becomes who was more Presidential in a debate over who hugged whom sometime in
the past when hugs were the end all be all.
HAGS
Bryan Harvey tweets @LawnChairBoys.
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