I’m not so much a football fan that I watch games involving teams I neither care about one way or the other nor expect to fare all that well this year (in terms of making the playoffs), so I didn’t watch any of the NFL season opener last night between the Jets and Redskins, aside from a handful of plays. I did watch, for about three minutes, the debate between the nine Democratic candidates for President, while waiting for last night’s rerun of Scrubs to come on. I’m not as big a political junkie as I used to be. I’m content to read analysis and watch the major speeches – – States of the Union, Inaugurals, convention acceptance speeches, and the like. Debates don’t do much for me at all, because they’re always pretty lame.
In their construction which is specifically geared to the sound bite, they tend to make all candidates look bad. The only specific times I can ever remember a candidate really looking good in a debate were the 1988 Vice Presidential debate when Lloyd Bentsen wiped the floor with Dan Quayle, and the second Presidential debate in 1992 when Bill Clinton showed off his mastery of the “town hall” format and then-President Bush got caught looking at his watch, a non-faux pas if there ever was one. Debates don’t encourage policy discussion. You get “policy McNuggets”: the name of some idea, just tossed out there, with no exegesis or exploration of how it would work. And you get manufactured quips and pre-conceived one liners. Yeah, Edwards’s use of “Hasta la vista” last night was really spontaneous. Sure. These kinds of lines always sound like what they are: precrafted bon mots which are memorized by the candidates who then wait for the appropriate time to drop them into conversation.
Debates, basically, are next to useless. They’re like preseason football games – – fun to watch if you’re really caught up in them, but not really indicative of anything substantive.
And besides, Scrubs is just a funny, funny show.
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