Lincoln-Douglas for the Brain-Damaged

The next weeks will provide evidence that the economy has not hit rock bottom, although the culture may have, when people in New York, Boston and elsewhere pay $50 or more to watch Bill Maher and Ann Coulter debate issues of the day.

To promote these historic events, part of a series titled "Minds That Move the World," Ms. Coulter deigned to give the "treasonous" New York Times an email interview, invoking Aristotle, Winston Churchill and Lincoln-Douglas as models for the encounter.

Closer to the mark would the old CNN freak show "Crossfire" demolished by Jon Stewart two years ago when he told Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala they were partisan hacks who “should be doing debate, which would be great, but you’re doing theater.”

On his weekly HBO show recently, Maher has looked lost without George Bush to riff on while Coulter, who reached a high point of loony invective by naming John Edwards a "faggot" and wishing him dead, is fighting a losing battle against Rush Limbaugh for the attention of the addled.

But give them this much: They are stimulating the economy with spending by people who are not likely to be doing anything better with their money.

Obama, McCain: TV Anchors Away

The candidates are opting out of the "let's you and him fight" format of the TV networks for presidential debates.

In rejecting a "town hall" proposed by ABC News and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, they must be thinking of the April Democratic debate that ended up with the audience booing moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos followed by widespread criticism for inciting an hour of nasty trivia. (Tom Shales of the Washington Post pasted the ABC anchors for "shoddy, despicable performances.")

Obama's spokesman said, “Both campaigns indicate that any additional appearances will be open to all networks for broadcast on TV or Internet like the presidential commission debates, rather than sponsored by a single network or news organization.”

McCain's spokesman said, "Both campaigns agree the town hall meetings will be open to press but not sponsored or moderated by the press."

The candidates are invoking the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a model but are not likely to embrace that format of a half-hour of oratory for one side, followed by an hour for the other and another half-hour of rebuttal.

That may have worked out for the single subject of slavery, but there are too many domestic and foreign-policy issues this year for such a formal approach.

What voters can hope for is a setting in which they ask the questions and the candidates respond to them and each other with substantive civility rather than the gotcha sound bites the TV networks want.

If the campaigns mean what they say, this year's presidential debates won't be an extension of "American Idol" and the survival tests of reality TV.

Has ABC Killed Presidential Debates?

For the time being, at least, nobody in America, except the desperate Clinton campaign, seems to want a rerun of last week's degrading boobfest.

Today North Carolina Democrats cancelled a scheduled CBS go-round next weekend with unusual political frankness: "While there was great interest in the debate, there were also growing concerns about what another debate would do to party unity."

In the New Yorker, under the title, "Bitter Patter," Hendrik Hertzberg sums up the fiasco:

"Last Wednesday’s two-hour televised smackdown in Philadelphia between the two remaining Democratic candidates for President, which might have been billed as the Élite Treat v. the Boilermaker Belle, turned into something worse—-something akin to a federal crime. Call it the case of the Walt Disney Company v. People of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (and of the United States, for that matter). Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time."

At the beginning of this interminable campaign, there was my hope that voters might be compensated for the agony by a modern version of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, with candidates getting beyond sound bites to discuss the issues at length.

Silly me. I should have known that, given the gatekeepers of our popular culture today, the candidate exchanges would end up closer to actual biting.