By Bill McCamley
Stephen: If I risk my neck for you, will I get a chance to kill Englishmen?
Hamish: Is your father a ghost, or do you converse with the Almighty?
Stephen: In order to find his equal, an Irishman is forced to talk to God. [Heavenward] Yes, Father. [To William Wallace and the others] The Almighty says don’t change the subject; just answer the f****** question.”
– “Braveheart”
OK, I admit it. I am sick and tired of the debates. I want answers to the questions the moderators are asking. No more sound bites. No more background explanations that take up the full two minutes. No more cheap shots at the other guy. Answers.
I had a whole other column written for this week, but had to change it after Tuesday’s debate. Here’s an inside political baseball trick that won’t surprise you: When you go to media training as a politician, the first and most regular thing you’re told is, “Never answer the question you are asked. Always answer the question you wish you were asked.” It isn’t even a secret now, since Sarah Palin blatantly refused to get off talking points last week. But it’s also been evident in the presidential debates, specifically in three critical areas of discussion.
In the last debate, Jim Lehrer tried hard to ask John McCain and Barack Obama what priorities they would cut to pay for the bailout. It was a great question, one that Americans, who are making tough choices for themselves, want to hear a clear answer to. Neither candidate gave one.
One of the town hall questioners yesterday asked what sacrifices the president would ask Americans to make in helping our nation get back on its feet. Once again, no specific responses. The last question at the town-hall debate was, “What do you know, and what do you not know?” Great question, and one that neither answered.
Tough situations
I’m not naive. Questions like this put candidates in tough situations. If you stay on message, only answering with a planned, memorized statement, you’re safe. All that will be heard is the point that you have no doubt polled as something that people will accept.
Furthermore, answers to most political questions cannot be simply answered. The world is a complicated place, and solutions to its problems can be just as complicated. Sometimes, when you try to give an answer realistically, a short statement can be taken completely out of context. Therefore, you run the risk of having a 30-second attack ad on TV within an hour saying that you are a bad person.
Mostly, this is OK. People have to win before they can make reality out of the policies they propose, and getting that position is important. And the truth is that if we, the voters, didn’t fall for the TV ads and sound bites, the candidates wouldn’t use the no-answer answer as a strategy. If we clamored for real answers passionately enough, the pros that work for the politicians wouldn’t instruct them to stay on message; they would say to tell the truth.
Unfortunately, that isn’t the case most of the time.
This isn’t most times
But this isn’t most times. We are facing one of the biggest economic crises in our history. I’m scared, and I’m not the only one. States, including
We’re electing the most powerful person in the world.
Times of crisis demand leadership, which sometimes means saying what people may not want to hear. That’s reality. It’s time to treat us like adults and tell us the truth.
I voted for Obama in the February primary, but didn’t truly become a supporter until the last week of March when Obama responded to the comments of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, with his “A More Perfect Union” speech. I loved it. It wasn’t talking points or poll-driven messages. He gave a true take about race in this country, how he viewed it and the solutions that he saw for all of us. I felt like an intelligent adult who was being asked to think.
Where is this forthrightness now? If we can discuss race this way, can’t we do the same for the economy? I want Obama to win and hope that after he is elected, without the political pressure of an upcoming election, he will become a true leader in the mold of JFK taking blame after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or FDR with his fireside chats asking all Americans to sacrifice so that everyone, working together, could rise out of the depression. But Obama has one more chance in the next debate to do it now. I think we would all be in a better position if it happened.
McCamley is the District 5 Doña Ana County commissioner.