The award shows are over for the time being, but just like the Academy, E-10 (Ellen’s Illinois Tenth Congressional District Blog) gives out the technical awards separately. In this post, I’m going to talk about the hits and misses of the Tenth Dems/WCPT Candidate Forum and the League of Women Voters Debate this past Saturday and Sunday.
On Saturday, Tenth Dems members and friends were treated to another WCPT simulcast of the Tenth Dems Candidate Forum. For WCPT’s part, they did a live remote broadcast of Dick’ Kay’s Back on the Beat. Tenth Dems provided that down-home Tenth District hospitality. Again, as it was last time, this event was a highlight of the congressional election cycle.
Whether you like Dick Kay or not, this event is fun. The crowd gets electric, sides rooting for their candidate, and that fires up the candidates.
Before the forum, we had a rare treat. One of our very own, John Hmurovic was on the show with Kay and Bill Brandt, currently working with the Tammy Duckworth campaign. They talked about the change in the district, the media and money in politics. I was glad to hear Brandt remembering, as we in the District must, that Bob Dold is a tea party candidate. I remember that Dold defeated Beth Coulson in their primary last time and did so as the tea party candidate. Dold seems to want to run away from that now.
Brandt predicted that Dold will get Super-PAC support and the Democratic challenger will have to rely on field work because there is no way to compete with the millions put into television by their Koch Brothers (and the like) supporters.
Hmurovic lamented that the media has given up its role in local political reporting. Kay and Brandt seemed to disagree, but I agree with Hmurovic. The major news media outlets put very little into these races, particularly our local television stations. Hmurovic was right when he said that the media tends to report more on the horse race part of elections than the issues. We have a bit more reporting out of the newcomer, Patch, but again they like the horse race, and we get nothing of note on television besides paid advertising. So, were do people find unbiased information about candidates?
Kay and Brandt seem to think social networking takes over. I use social networking sites, but it’s mostly people sharing links with their friends and to the extent that there are few links to share, social media is not going to make up for reporting, and forget unbiased reporting. I really have no idea what Kay and Brandt were talking about there.
After the interview portion of the show, Kay took us to the Candidate forum. It’s a little tough with the commercial breaks, and most of the questions were fairly generalized, but for what it was, Kay generally did a good job. I like that he asked them not only what they would do for the economy, but where would they get the money. He asked about PACs and the ill-informed electorate. He also asked them where they would disagree with Obama. He did, however, allow candidates to morph the question into something they wanted to answer, as all candidates are prone to do these days when they’re attacked from all sides. The media and PAC question ended up being one about education in general. But, then Kay required a follow-up about communities where parents might not be equipped to support their children’s education.
On the radio, time did not permit in depth discussion on any one issue. It might be fun to have something similar on one topic so some specifics can be discussed. Or, maybe that’s just not worth it anymore because voters prefer the quick, emotional rather than substantive answer. Is that turning out good for the country?
On Sunday, the League of Women’s (LWV) voters took over. They had their “debate”, but it’s not really a debate at all. In their defense, none of these “debates” are debates anymore. There are several different kinds of debates, but generally to be a debate, a forum has to involve some sort of discussion over a specific question with some evidence given, deliberation and persuasion. I’d argue that the LWV format takes the evidence, specificity, deliberation and opposition out of the format rendering it more of a candidate forum or a recitation of their website position statements.
LWV takes questions from the audience, but they edit out questions that could lead to serious disagreement and most of anything that would help a candidate distinguish himself from the others. They throw out the hard questions, don’t let the candidates call each other on anything, and ask no follow-ups to ask a candidate to explain a statement or position. LWV didn’t allow a question about Schneider’s Republican donations and didn’t allow anyone to call Sheyman on his work for MoveOn to stop discussion of single payer health care reform as he now runs on favoring the same.
LWV is supposed to have a strict policy that no unopposed candidates get to speak. However, when Republican State Rep candidate Lauren Turelli failed to show up (or call saying she would not appear), they let her opponent, Mark Neerhof, go on for quite a long time, unquestioned and unopposed, ranting about how limiting access to health care is good for health care. I think he means good for Doctors who don’t want to help anyone who cannot pay and pay a lot for the service. I’m not sure how LWV judged that spectacle to be within their rules or within reason or fairness. In any event, I think it worked against Neerhof who looked bad up there ranting, and Turelli was probably strategically correct in declining to attend. She just should have been more polite about it, and RSVP’d, and from what I hear, she agrees with Neerhof on cutting health care to the middle class and poor.
Their Democratic opponent, Scott Drury, attended the event, but was not allowed to speak because he is unopposed. I get that Drury has no primary, and Neerhof and Turelli do, but LWV allowed Neerhof to go on and on, unquestioned and unopposed for a very long time. It was a rant on Neerhof’s own terms, free advertising. A Republican allowed to rant and a Democrat shut out of the discussion, par for the course with the corporate media. I expected more from LWV.
LWV departed from another one of their rules, allowing a Republican tracker to tape the proceedings. Apparently, all you have to do to get LWV to break their rules is claim you’re a student. They didn’t get that someone can be a student and a partisan political tracker.
For these reasons and probably others, the E-10 technical award goes to Tenth Dems/WCPT for calling the event what is was, not a debate, but a candidate forum, allowing for comments to flow more organically back and forth, and for at least a few follow-up questions by Kay. In any event, I think we have a long way to go to improving the dialog among candidates. John Hmurovic is right. The media needs to do more to present the issues in an un-biased fashion.
