Equal and adequate time?
Years ago, Jeff Auer commented (after the Kennedy Nixon debates in 1960) that an event called a debate had certain characteristics, one of which was that the participants would need to have equal and adequate time for dealing with the topic(s) of the debate. Seeing the "talk clock" for the Republican primary debate held last evening in New Hampshire tells just part of the story about the usefulness of the format with respect to the criterion of equal and adequate time. It's not just a matter of how much time certain candidates struggle to get in a "gang" debate format; what also matters is when those candidates get to talk, and about what.
One of the most notable differences between the typical general election debate format and the ones that have dominated the early primary campaign debate season is that the current slate of debates makes no pretense about trying to provide equal time to the candidates on the stage, and the extent to which the format has failed in that regard is unquestionable. The moderator spoke almost twice as long as did the candidate who had the most "talk time," and almost four times as long as the candidate who received the fewest opportunities to speak. So we know Wolf Blitzer a lot better now, but what of the others on the stage?
: debate formats, primary debates, presidential debates
Total talk time is a crude measure that starts the discussion of how a format worked on the equal time criterion. The next step is to look at what the candidtes got to talk about, and when. If you examine the second half of last night's debate, the "town hall" style portion, it's very clear that some of the participants weren't given a fair opportunity to engage the audience and their opponents.
Tommy Thompson, for example, got to reply to just two questions, and one of those was the "what's the biggest mistake this administration has made" question that was the only question in this half of the debate that every candidate got to answer. It's hard to blame Thompson for going off the deep end in his answer to the one other question he did get (the idea of a single payer health care plan)-- here he launched into a quick blizzard of statistics about health insurance that revealed what he knows about the issue but probably did little to provide a persuasive answer about how to change what's wrong.
Mike Huckabee accurately captured the problem when he observed that he was getting all of the "morality" questions in the debate. Aside from the one question directed to him on this topic, Huckabee got just two other chances -- the "biggest mistake" question that everyone answered, and the "what does it mean to be an American" question (the last one of the evening) that almost everyone answered.
Almost everyone, that is -- because the debate ended with the moderator asking three candidates for their final thoughts. You could guess which three were asked even if you didn't see the debate.
Candidates also had unequal opportunities to benefit from what one might call "placement" effects -- taking advantage of when they were able to enter the debate fray. The first town hall question, an emotional one from a woman who lost her brother in Irag, ended with McCain giving a relatively long (by this debate's standards) answer to her directly -- thanking her for her brother's commitment and sacrifice, and then reemphasizing the need to complete the job. McCain was the first candidate in this segment to stand up and move toward the questioner when he answered -- like Clinton did famously in the 1992 town hall debate. And the sequence of camera shots, including a series of close ups of the obviously emotional questioner (who often nooded in agreement with McCain) emphasize that his answer was connecting.
This was the final piece of this segment. No other candidate benefited as clearly from placement as McCain did. He also got the last word on the exchange between Romney and Tancredo regarding Romney's statements about English as the national language, which Tancredo called a bit disingenuous given that Romney was running ads in Spanish. So, here's McCain, beginning by saying "Muchos gracias" and ending with a reference to the names on the Viet Nam memorial wall -- a remark harkening back to John Kennedy's "Houston Ministers" speech, except that he was refering to the names at the Alamo. This was, again, the last word on this point. And, by the way, guess who gave the very final response in the debate?
No one debates the difficulty in trying to manage a debate with so many participants. But the basic format premise, the absence of a strict equal time requirement on all questions, leaves the debate vulnerable to playing out in ways that disadvantage some while giving others a benefit. In a world where everyone has less time to talk than the moderator, even small differences can matter.
