Opinion

GREAT DEBATES, NOT

One hundred and fifty years ago today, some 10,000 people stood for more than three hours in the sweltering heat of Ottawa, Ill., as two candidates for a US Senate seat conducted the first in a series of the most memorable political debates in American history.

Abraham Lincoln would lose that election to Stephen A. Douglas – but the national reputation he won from those seven one-on-one contests propelled him to the presidency a scant two years hence.

Today, a US senator from the same state of Illinois has won his party’s presidential nomination based largely on the same kind of stirring rhetoric that was heard back in 1858.

But it’s unlikely that this fall’s three scheduled debates between Barack Obama and John McCain will even approach the unforgettable exchange of ideas that took place when Lincoln and Douglas shared the stage.

That’s because today’s debates are dispassionate affairs in which the candidates exchange meaningless 60-second snippets of carefully scripted replies to a series of often bizarre questions put by self-aggrandizing news personalities on often-irrelevant topics.

McCain tried to remedy this by proposing a series of 10 town-hall meetings with Obama that would allow substantive discussion and a give-and-take between the candidates and between candidates and audience.

But Obama, who at first termed the proposal a good idea, later rejected it.

Nor does either candidate seem interested in the challenge launched last year by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich – a plan in which the two nominees would engage in nine 90-minute debates with expanded discussion on a wide range of issues.

Once again, then, viewers will be treated to a pointless procession of sound bites, while pundits wait, hopefully, for one candidate or the other to step on a verbal banana peel.

Fully 150 years later, Lincoln and Douglas surely would weep.