Daniel Greenfield write in his excellent blog,  Sultan Knish, A Debate in the Land of the Deaf, 10/3/12

Excerpts:

The modern political debate is not a test of ideas, but of candidates. HD cameras and screens make it possible for us to see every wince and grimace, and to measure how slowly a candidate responds. The debate is not won by intelligence, but by a combination of populist empathy and low zingers. Those zingers are usually all we remember from past debates because the age of the public and politician that could participate in the marathon Lincoln Douglas debates is long over and everyone knows it.

The debates are rarely about a public interested in weighing and measuring ideas, but a reality show where the candidate who has one bad moment becomes fodder for the late night jokes of the next day. And if the candidates and the public are sub-par, the moderators are even worse appearing only to promote one candidate and one agenda.

It’s not that we don’t have a culture of ideas because the public is stupid, though a key section of the electorate certainly wouldn’t qualify to vote under any poll test, but because our politics are stupid. Our politics are relentlessly short term, our policies extend to the next month and our awareness barely lasts that long.

The Lincoln Douglas debates appealed to a country that thought long term, that measured politicians the way that investors measure a prospectus. Our current debates appeal to a country where people get incoherently frustrated when their signal drops and who don’t watch TV anymore because it’s easier to catch the highlights tomorrow. These are the types of people who will accept the robbing of their retirement accounts so the government can go on making them feel good about themselves.

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