Stomping in Lowell

We did learn quite a bit about Scott Brown last evening — despite his clearest intentions to prevent that. He certainly did not convert any undecided voters, but his claque loved every dodge, every smirk and every personal snipe.

As the last debate-like-event, the moderator had a decided sensationalist bent and was not at all a liberal. In Lowell, David Gregory, a conservative, allowed Brown to avoid answering questions from him, Elizabeth Warren, and the students. He also let Brown bully him into a time advantage. That was all predictable.

C-Span has the whole debate available here.

My wife and I went. The trip was worth it, in the very least to sense and and hear the rowdy crowd reactions. Brown's supporters (each side had 500 tickets — about 10% of the arena, plus the crowd divisions) did not mind at all that he still refused to explain votes favoring huge financial and petroleum companies or repeated dishonest personal attacks. In fact, they cheered those.

Much will be made of Brown's few and acid weapons — Native-American ancestry, and his knowingly false portrayal of two complex legal settlements Warren lawyered in. What I learned instead from his smirks, sarcasm and sidesteps is that he fully expects to continue a content-free campaign. Even with nearly two years of recorded votes, he refuses to let anyone, another candidate much less a voter, hold him accountable.

He also is incredibly indecisive, willfully ignorant, or dishonest about his policies and positions. With the exception of "absolutely" opposing the Dream Act as a form of amnesty, a stance he'd been quoted on numerous times and thus unavoidable, he fudged all questions about how he might vote. It was as though he hasn't thought about whether he'd support the reactionary hardliner Mitch McConnell to head the Senate if the GOP should take it, whether he'd let tax cuts for millionaires and above expire if offset with spending cuts, and anything else substantial.

Instead on one major question after another, he played and overplayed his alleged impartial card (a.k.a. the bipartisan ploy). He couldn't and wouldn't tell us what we'd get by electing him to a full term. He'd pore over each bill's contents, he'd listen to all arguments and only then decide what he believed and would do. While he refuses to call himself a Republican in person or in campaign material, that sounded dreadfully like the Romney/Ryan shtick. They say that their economic plan is too complex to explain, so we need to elect them and let Congress work out the details. Walrus wings, I say!

Amusingly to the intimate gathering of 5,000, we saw differences even during the photo-op before the show, then again during the break and afterward. The self-presenting nice guy was cold and avoided engagement. Warren in contrast tried to chat him up, smiled at him, the moderator and the audience, waved to her husband, and, well, was the nice guy. The difference was she wasn't pretending.

Watching Brown relatively closely was better than on TV, with the many cutaways. I thought throughout of the younger version. He's big on smirking and being pleased with his perceived cleverness. Likely he fell into one of those three classes that teachers and parents praise:

1. Fast answer. Kids conditioned to respond with the quickest reply tend to be partially wrong or shallow in analysis.
2. Deep thought. The big brains tend to take longer but come up closest to truth.
3. Clever. The cute reply, often with a learned grin, may be disarming while really not answering the question.

He often doesn't answer at all, much less quickly. He isn't particularly bright (I'd bet she has 30 IQ points on him). Yet, he obviously has a learned response of going for the light and witty over candid or analytic.

Also, last evening as in the previous kind-of debate it was plain that he does not like being challenged, particularly by a woman. The defining moment was one he clearly had prepared and likely practiced (to the praise of his wife maybe). While he had run long, refused to address the questions the moderator asked, and talked over Warren repeatedly, when she tried to cut in with a point, he whipped out his big quip of the night, "Excuse me, I’m not a student in your classroom."

That was not the only condescension of the 50 minutes, only the most graceless. He actually performed better near the end. She scored first answering an inane hypothetical from Gregory about why it might be that MA has never elected a woman as its US Senator. She said she didn't know, but she was working to change that.

Shortly after, he got in his best of the night by responding to a pointed question about whether she was qualified, as in earned her way, to her Harvard Law tenured professorship. The implication seemed to be an effort to return to the ancestry/affirmative action opening where Brown has yet to show any evidence she got an advantage by listing herself in a directory as having Native-American background. Instead, he made his best feint of the show saying she likely was an excellent professor and he was working to make sure she stayed one. Point and counterpoint.

Unfortunately, Gregory was only a tiny bit sharper than the rumpled of clothes and mind Jon Keller in the first meeting. He too not only opened with the ancestry non-issue, but let it consume over a quarter of the show. We were robbed of substance again.

Throughout what they did get to, Brown assiduously avoided challenges from both mod and challenger. For example, called to task for voting for continued multi-billion dollar oil subsidies when petro companies are hugely profitable, he gave no rationalization. Instead, he said oil companies were going to get that money secondhand from Congressional action or directly from raising prices. He apparently has never considered that stopping the corporate welfare would be the end of it and Congress and President could make sure that was true. Viewing giant industries as masters and unstoppable juggernauts is not the way to go, unless you bend over for their campaign contributions.

Yet that was another benefit of being there. Brown's supporters clapped, stomped and cheered wildly at even his dumbest responses. While Gregory urged everyone before starting not to interrupt with such responses, both sides ended up ignoring him. I listened carefully and figure that perhaps Warren supporters outnumbered Brown ones by 50% or so, at least by oral volume, similar to the crowds outside before it began. Both sides made plenty of noise.

I don't have a whole lot of hope for more substance in the remaining, staged for TV sort-of debates. The format stinks and leads to the shallowness we've seen in the first two, particularly under two lame moderators.

Without question, Warren is smart, knowledgeable and substantive. Brown isn't going to become forthcoming or honest in the next three weeks. We'll continue to have inequality with avoidance on one side.

Debates: Decisive v. Perfunctory

A truly crude publisher at a magazine I edited had a way of describing the pro forma. "It's like peeing in a blue serge suit. It gives you a nice, warm feeling, but nobody notices."

Modern debate-like objects may well fall in that class. They aren't the classic rhetorical contests from city-state times or even the pre-U.S. Civil War era. Back when free-form, one-to-one, open-ended agones let two contenders go at each other for as long as it took to exhaust their arguments.

Now the candidate fora and even the two-person so-called debates offer little opportunity for cogent policy or even brilliance. Seemingly dull-witted moderators and questioners serve up predictable topics to which candidates respond just as you'd expect. The only revelations or joys come when a candidate says something ignorant or stupid, the old gaffe track that the media live to report. These events are best suited for tweets.

How powerful?

Grousing about the inferior format aside, we have to wonder how meaningful these are and whether they truly influence elections.

The self-interested love to claim each election hinges on debates. This is particularly the case from the sponsors. Consider the October 1st spectacle between Sen. Scott Brown and challenger Elizabeth Warren.

It will be at UMASS Lowell, co-sponsored by the Boston Herald, and broadcast on cable TV at NECN and two AM radio stations, WBZ and WRKO. So, this allegedly crucial debate is likely to have a limited Boston-area audience for a statewide race.

The contest itself is unarguably a big deal. Dems need this seat to retain control of the U.S. Senate. Also, politically and emotionally there's the issue of whether to give the self-promoting wastrel a full term in a seat long held by an activist progressive. Whoever wins this go could well hold this seat for 12 or 24 or more years or more.

Writing of the self-interested, the promo for the debate, as reported in the Herald, includes hyperbole. WBZ's director of news and programming, Peter Casey, said, "(We are) looking forward to carrying this debate between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown, because it’s a critical Senate race for the WBZ audience and also for control of the Senate. Debates have become a major element and deciding factor in modern campaigns, and we are proud to take part in the process of letting the people choose."

Any Proof?

Those are oft-repeated assertions, but almost entirely without proof. Like with better-safe-than-sorry posits, most of us likely do not question its validity.

Nosing around in books and clicking around the net, there's little to support the power of the modern debate or forum. The best background and analysis I saw was at Franklin and Marshall College's Center for Politics & Public Affairs. Several of their professors, notably Dr. G. Terry Madonna and Dr. Michael Young, took the subject on from the Presidential level.

They include the conventional political wisdom — "Historically, debates played that role in 1960, 1976, and probably 1980." Certainly for the first, we love the idea that a sweating, sneaky looking Nixon lost the election debating the calm and candid Kennedy. Yet with only three likely examples, each of these is questionable.

Kennedy was already overtaking Nixon. Then in 1976, Watergate's effect may have doomed Ford. Debates of 1980, 1988 and 1992 sit in popular political mythology as being won and lost in debates, but each was likely decided by events and trends instead. As the profs conclude, "In fact, the evidence suggests that modern debates only rarely determine the outcome of elections."

There may be no relationship between debate performance and job performance. While the ideal leader should shine in both, how many pols can you think of that do?

Modern debate traits include:

• Small attendance, even with media coverage and broadcast
• "Viewers are voters with the keenest interest in politics or the party activists themselves."
• Most attend or watch to reinforce their decision on a candidate
• The undecided rarely watch or listen
• Neighbors, coworkers and news snippets are more likely influences

Still, the idea of debates is attractive. Many of us love the concept that we are wise, rational and open-minded, that we come into October deserving to have candidates perform for us, sway us.

High and Low

It's likely too that debates are most powerful influences on the top and bottom. This time at the POTUS level, there's greater than normal interest. At the least, we all have serious stake the recovery and the extrication from war. So the top will get pretty good views, at least of the next day snippets if not the full debates.

Farther down, a few statewide races, like in Missouri and Massachusetts, are contentious enough and covered enough by fragmented broadcast and the asthenic print media. At least in the predigested, next-day bites, these debates will get some notice.

At the local level, the Tip O'Neill true platitude that all politics are local can work. Where there are rare open seats, officials accused of incompetence or corruption, and hot cultural issues at play, voters wants lots of mini-shows. Candidates have been going from one debate-like-object to another covering their neighborhoods and whole districts. Voters demand they perform.

So on all three levels, fora and debates can be big. It's just that in most cases, there's scant evidence they sway voters at all. For the vast majority of races, debates don't seem to do anything beyond feeling good.

As a lover of politics, I don't mind that we beat the drums for debates. Pretending each one is crucial to that contest or even to the whole of the democratic process is almost always an incredible exaggeration. I'll give that a pass, as it is for the good cause of getting for keeping voters engaged.

Brown/Warren note: There are actually four variations on broadcast debates. This may well lead to voter fatigue. In addition to 10/1, there is a 9/20, 10/1 and 10/30. Only one is West, in Springfield, one is only with Jon Keller, and one gets lots of Boston-area media, including sponsor the Globe.