A Right to Be Dull

Mitchell Stephens writes:

The most effective strategy for winning most elections is, of course, to struggle toward, and try to shove your opponent out of, the middle — that being where most of the votes, at least most of the undecided votes, usually are. Sure a principled few would rather be right (or left) than president or governor or senator. But most candidates, bearing the weight of some real causes and many real careers (not least their own) would prefer to be elected (on the assumption, presumably, that they might then find occasions, within the limits of effective governing strategies, to do right). Consequently there is much that mainstream candidates feel that they, as Ellen Willis puts it, "can't say."

In the now-revered debates that distinguished the Illinois senatorial campaign in 1858, for example, Stephen Douglas expended considerable energy trying to paint his opponent, Abraham Lincoln, as an extreme abolitionist. At one point Douglas referred to the Republicans as the "Black Republicans" three times in a single sentence. Lincoln, for his part (and to his shame), was at pains to point out that he had "no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races." (The two candidates were, literally, fighting for the middle of the state, with the northern third expected to vote Republican, the southern third Democratic.)

Even candidates who are busy elbowing their way toward the middle are presumably capable of elucidating, edifying or even, upon occasion, producing what Jay Rosen calls "crucial events in the life of the country." I guess Douglas and Lincoln, debating at great length, on seven different occasions, before people with few other channels to which to turn for stimulation, demonstrated that.

However, as candidates grapple and dodge, in constant fear of giving their opponents leverage, their performances more commonly display all the dash and verve of Sumo wrestling. This inevitable caution and sluggishness undoubtedly helps explain a conclusion Ralph Waldo Emerson came to some years before the Lincoln-Douglas debates: "There are some subjects," he wrote about politics, "that have a kind of prescriptive right to dull treatment."

I did not, consequently, find the Gore-Bush presidential debates particularly surprising or dispiriting. I had not expected a deep or candid discussion of the issues. There are other places to turn for that (journals and writers who, like my colleagues here, are decidedly not dull). I do not "pretend," as Susie Linfield puts it, "that a true contest between world views and visions and interests is being fought" today, any more than I believe one was being fought in 1960. I do, however, believe that one of the candidates in this election, as in that one, comes somewhat closer to my world view and would make a somewhat better president than the other candidate. I certainly did not care whether the tone of these debates was civil or contentious. (Lincoln, I note, accused Douglas of "misrepresentation" that was "very gross and palpable.") And I do not fear that we are witnessing an increase in the tendency of candidates to, in Todd Gitlin's words, "sloganize and muffle themselves." I think not only of "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too" in 1840, but of "Everything will be rosy with Roosevelt" in 1932.

Instead, I watched these debates, as I presume the large majority of Americans watched, with one overriding concern: I hoped that the candidate I had long ago decided to support would discuss the issues with whatever balance of civility and contentiousness, whatever degree of depth or candor, was needed to win over that small minority of Americans who had (unaccountably, to me) not yet made up their minds. And I hoped, with similar passion, that the other guy would say something manifestly, undeniably stupid.

Judging from the numerous appearances of interjections such as "Hurrah for Douglas" or "Hit him again" in the transcripts of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, I suspect that the large part of the audiences those events attracted had a similar concern.

- Mitchell Stephens, a professor of journalism and mass communication at New York University, is the author most recently of "the rise of the image, the fall of the word."