Barack Obama, who has correctly characterized the insipid questions he and other Democratic Party candidates were asked by moderators in the North Carolina ABC TV debate, as "tit for tat silliness," made a deeper point, when he also said:"It took us 45 minutes before we even started talking about a single issue that matters to the American people . . . 45 minutes before we heard about healthcare, 45 minutes before we heard about Iraq, 45 minutes before we heard about jobs, 45 minutes before we heard about gas prices."
The performance of the ABC moderators of that debate has been heavily criticized, both within the Democratic Party structure and in newsletters and blogs devoted to media coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign.
Yesterday's challenge from Hillary Clinton was an open, positively framed invitation:
"I'm offering Sen. Obama a chance to debate me one-on-one, no moderators. ... Just the two of us going for 90 minutes, asking and answering questions; we'll set whatever rules seem fair.
"I think that it would give the people of Indiana and I assume a few Americans might tune in because nearly 11 million watched the Philadelphia debate. And I think they would love seeing that kind of debate and discussion. Remember, that's what happened during the Lincoln-Douglas debates."
I'm a strong believer that the seven 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates were a defining moment in the history of American politics. The national interest drawn to them on the eve of the election which forced the slavery question into an open rebellion by the conservative slave states of the deep South against the liberal, free labor majority in the North and Northwest, showed the growing power of newspapers, and their effect on the American public.
At that time, the American polity was beginning to see the benefits of the rising paradigm of free public education, especially in the rapidly growing, young populations of the new states above the Ohio River - Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio. It was in one of those, Illinois - where Lincoln had gotten an early taste for politics by serving on new-fangled things like "school boards" - that the seven debates occurred. It is another of those, Indiana, in which Sen. Clinton now proposes an open, free-form debate.
Too often, 21st century media coverage of presidential politics in the USA is like a long, drawn out episode of American Idol. The moderators' performance in the North Carolina debate was, as Tom Shales of the Washington Post called it, "despicable." But it wasn't much worse than many of the ten other nationally televised debates between or among the Democratic presidential candidates.
So, why not have an open debate between Senators Obama and Clinton? To me, it would be an enormous breath - Gust! - of fresh air.
I'd also like to see more forums in Alaska for our outstanding candidates for the AK-AL U.S. House seat, and for Sen. Ted Stevens' U.S. Senate seat. The Kodiak FishCom debate last month was widely covered, and noticed nationally. There are many topics Alaskans want to hear our candidates address in ways that afford honest comparison: renewable energy, the health care crisis, the extremely fragile robustness of the Alaska economy and our eviscerated military and veteran structures, to name a few.
The only scheduled high profile comparison in the future I know of will be the candidates' speeches - back-to-back - at the upcoming Democratic Party State Convention, to be held at the Palmer Fairgrounds, over Memorial Day weekend.
We could use more. The voters would respond at the polls, and our party would grow.