AND THE WINNER OF THE DEBATE WAS . . .

OCTOBER 2, 2024 – While pundits left and right debate who “won” the “debate,” my figurative gavel comes down in favor of “Marcus,” the self-confident Oakland University undergraduate among the MSNBC focus group of his peers from the Rochester, Michigan school. When asked about J. D. Vance’s criticism of Harris’s “policy” as VP, Marcus said, “[A]nyone who took high school civics class would know what the vice president can do and what the vice president can’t do. Neither candidate on that stage talked about what executive action they’re going to take on day one [. . . ] because they know they can’t because that’s not how the vice presidency works. You don’t get to do what you want. You do what the president delegates you to do.”

I’ve been on this same rant for years, my latest installment having coincided with the previous “debate” between Trump and Harris. The average American voter—and typical “debate moderator,” not to mention political pundits and commentators—seem to have skipped “high school civics class.”

Another class skipped is what was traditionally called “Rhetoric”—thinking and arguing logically, which in the context of political rhetoric is the ability to identify scapegoats and weak logic. If we could allow ourselves to be impressed by Vance’s chameleon-like ability to swallow his words about the “American Hitler,” no one should’ve been fooled by his whole herd of scapegoats: illegal immigrants, often confused with legal immigrants, such as the Haitians of Springfield. Upset by inflation? Blame illegal immigrants. Think fentanyl is a big problem? Stop illegal immigration. Too many guns? Again, it’s the illegal immigrants. Housing shortage? Of course—illegal immigrants. If a debate-watcher hadn’t learned to question, to analyse, to think, then by the end of Vance’s repetitive regurgitation of a carefully rehearsed talking point invented by the Grand Wizard of the Personal Cult, the viewer would happily pin the nation’s problems on the backs of illegal immigration and vote for the Grand Wizard and the Grand Chameleon.

As I’ll continue to say about presidential debates, they’re not really debates. They’re performances. It’s a bit as if we all get to vote for the president of a gigantic public university without knowing or understanding much about the job, except that, well, it must come with omnipotence and omniscience. Got a problem with your math grades? It must be the university president’s fault. Want fancier treadmills in the campus workout center? The president better deliver! Why is pizza at the student union so expensive? Blame the president. Football team not doing so well? The president needs to get down on the grid-iron and kick some butt.

And speaking of football, the presidential and vice-presidential “debates” . . . er, performances . . . are about as informative as subjecting candidates for the position of university president to a kick-pass-catch-run-block-tackle test on the gridiron. At several levels such a “try-out” would be downright silly but not as silly, perhaps, as the serious post-“debate” quarterbacking that occurs across the American mediascape.

If only—if only—we could widen our perspectives and deepen our attention spans to understand better how the world works; how factors interact in complex circles of cause and effect. If only a fraction of the $7.2 billion in presidential and congressional campaign donations received and $6 billion spent from January 1, 2024 through June 30, 2024—let alone the hundreds of millions received and spent since then—could be earmarked not for consultant fees, inane TV commercials and “flash” ads on social media, but for remedial civics and traditional rhetoric classes, we’d have a far better educated electorate. Then, perhaps, with higher standards we’d put scapegoats out to pasture and expect higher standards among people running for higher office.

Meanwhile, as vice president maybe Tim Walz the former social studies teacher can be an effective advocate for teaching and learning high school level American civics. And I vote for Marcus to serve as the official teaching assistant.

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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson