For more than 15 years now, CABL has partnered with Louisiana Public Broadcasting to produce more than a dozen statewide televised debates in major elections in our state. This year we have invited U.S. Senator David Vitter and Congressman Charles Melancon to appear in another in this long standing series of forums on October 21.
While the question of debates has recently turned into some degree of political fodder, we hope when the dust settles both of the major candidates for U.S. Senate will participate in forums like ours and others and give voters an opportunity to see and hear them in a setting that offers more than the standard 30-second TV commercial.
There are a lot of reasons for this and many of them can be summed up in the words of voters. A few years ago, the Pew Charitable Trusts helped fund a project on standards and guidelines for political debates which resulted in The Debate Book, edited by Louisiana native and former legislator Ron Faucheaux.
As part of the project voters came together in focus groups to talk about the value – or not – of political debates. The views they expressed were insightful and candidates running for any public office should consider their opinions. Here are some of the things these voters had to say:
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Debates deliver important information about candidates that is necessary to make informed decisions on Election Day.
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Debates provide opportunities to get information that voters can’t find elsewhere.
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Voters like the fact that debates give them an opportunity to see and hear candidates free of media filtering.
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Debates go deeper into the issues and reveal more of the candidates’ knowledge and address a wider range of topics than other elements of their campaigns.
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Because they’re unscripted, they provide more insight into the candidates and show their capacity for quick thinking and handling pressure.
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They also help reveal more about the candidates’ character, personality and style which rarely come across in more controlled environments.
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Finally, voters like that they are fair and they give the candidates an equal opportunity to be heard.
In essence what they say is that live debates give them the opportunity to see and hear candidates outside of pep rallies and controlled, choreographed and scripted settings. They feel like they get “real” information, not the message of the day.
Interestingly, when they talk about what they don’t like about debates, those factors come out, too. They don’t like rehearsed and simplistic, canned responses to questions about important matters. They don’t like it when they see candidates try to break the rules. And they don’t like it when the candidates resort to negative attacks on each other.
These are all lessons the candidates should pay attention to. In this day and age voters are subjected to a seemingly never ending barrage of paid campaign media on TV, the radio and now on the Internet. Much of that is narrow, distorted, one-sided, and frankly often pretty ugly. But the issues we expect our elected leaders for major office to deal with are weighty and deserving of much more attention than that.
CABL and LPB remain committed to offering issue-oriented forums that are geared toward the needs of voters – not the campaigns. Debates aren’t perfect vehicles for providing information, but they can be informative, engaging and revealing. Their independence from the campaigns and live settings provide citizens with a window into the candidates that can be found nowhere else. As such, they are a critical part of our democracy and CABL is pleased to be a partner with LPB in offering these types of forums to the public.