By Chris Satullo

You might have missed this particular news story, as you worried about more important things like Ukraine, inflation, and the furor over whether Joel Embiid gets too many foul calls. But, last week, the head of the Republican National Committee announced that her party was not willing to play ball anymore with the Presidential Commission on Debates.

This probably means that, in the 2024 presidential campaign, we won’t get to experience (endure?) the traditional series of three fall debates, replete with planned gibes, hyped gaffes, misleading stats, self-important journos, and nervous voters reading off note cards.

My gut reaction: Good riddance.

The two major parties set up the bipartisan commission in 1987 to serve as a referee and honest broker charged with ensuring that this national political tradition begun in 1960 – the televised presidential debate – could carry on, while keeping partisan bickering within manageable boundaries. 

But a certain former president and likely 2024 candidate never met a boundary on his behavior that he didn’t scorn, whine about and seek to obliterate. And, of course, the head of the RNC who announced its withdrawal from the commission, Ronna McDaniel, has long served as a ventriloquist’s dummy for the Orange One.

To be honest, the debates had begun to feel like a tired and counterproductive anachronism even before Donald Trump turned them into a toxic farce. So, my thought for Ronna McDaniel as she snatches up her ball and goes home is: Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

But first, before trying to think of a better way to inform the presidential electorate, we must pause a moment to savor how false, hypocritical and ludicrous were the reasons McDaniel gave for this GOP snit fit.

She could have said – correctly – that the staid format, with its fussy obsession about time limits, had outlived its purpose. She could have said that advancements in digital tech, real-time fact-checking and genuine voter engagement offer promise of new formats that would provide voters with genuinely useful insights and information, rather than this tired ritual of snark, cherry-picking and mudslinging.

McDaniel, of course, said no such thing.

Here’s what she did offer as reason for the RNC’s exit stage right: The commission was “biased” in its selection of debate moderators and needs “transparent criteria for selecting debate moderators that would disqualify individuals from consideration who have apparent conflicts of interest due to personal, professional, or partisan factors.” Also, she said, the commission had refused to agree to the RNC’s demand that it schedule all debates before any “early voting” began.

On the bias/criteria point, her words at first blush might seem reasonable. After all, partisan hacks or journalists with grinding axes in full view shouldn’t moderate debates. But dig in a bit on her terms bias and apparent conflict of interest. In McDaniel’s RNC, bias is a synonym for “doesn’t back DJT 100 percent no matter what he does or says.” So that wipes out all journalists even a smidge to the right of Fox News’ nighttime pundit lineup (including most of the Fox News news staff).

And ponder that apparent: Apparent to whom? How? In a world full of viciously partisan bloggers and talk pundits, any journalist who has ever placed truth and facts above allegiance to the Orange God will be accused by someone somewhere on Twitter of having “an apparent conflict of interest.” Should that be disqualifying? She’s setting a partisan trap here.

The example the RNC cites of the commission supposedly not weeding out conflict of interest reveals how it’s playing this game: In 2020, Trump backers pitched a fit over the choice of C-Span’s Steve Scully as a debate participant. His mortal sin: For one month, while in college, he interned in Joe Biden’s Senate office – in 1978. (Scully did not cover himself with glory in his response to this flap, but that’s a separate story.)

Let me review the facts of the indictment: Intern. One month. 1978.

Absurd.

But, OK, let’s just pretend McDaniel has higher standards than I do. Then quizzle me this: Do you think the RNC would find a way to defend the choice were Sean Hannity of Fox News, Trump’s human colonoscopy and ride-or-die defender, somehow to worm his way onto a debate panel? Of course they would, with McDaniel leading the way.

OK, enough on her. These days, decrying examples of forehead-slapping hypocrisy and bad faith by Trumpistas is like counting the spots on a leopard. The old-style debate is dead, so let’s be grateful to be spared the spectacle of Trump violating its corpse in 2024.

So, what else could we do to best inform the crucial slice of the electorate that will be undecided on that election?

First off, let’s put voters, not journalists, at the center of the enterprise. I’m a journalist; most of my best friends are journalists; I married a journalist; I raised a journalist. I love journalists. But we a) really don’t do a great job at those debates and b) the ritual wars over our supposed “bias” are an inevitable and lamentable distraction from the forum.

So, here’s an idea. Let’s resurrect, revamp and supercharge political scientist James Fishkin’s model of a citizen convention as in-depth preparatory step for generating an outstanding pool of citizen questioners for election forums. Pull together a representative racial, geographic and political sample of American voters, about 400 of them, and invite them for three days packed with factual issue briefings and deliberative dialogues among themselves. 

Use the convention as a kind of tryout for citizen questioners, choosing a cohort of about 30 of the most thoughtful, quick-witted among them as the group to take the lead role in coming televised forums. Make sure there’s viewpoint diversity in the group, but over-select for the kinds of independents and moderates whose late-breaking choices typically decide close elections.

Have each voter propose several questions that they’d like to ask the candidates. In a key phase, put those proposed queries up for comment, suggestions and ranking by the rest of the larger sample. Emerge from that iterative process with 30 really sound, probing questions that can be sorted into three thematic groupings.

Then stage three “candidate evenings” on the usual timetable. (McDaniels’ complaint about debates “during voting” leaves me utterly cold.).

Note I haven’t called these events debates. I see no value – other than feeding material to late-night monologues, Twitter wits and oped writers desperate for a Sunday topic – in putting the candidates in the same room to trade snarky barbs and hyped accusations.  Spare us.

I don’t really need to see how the candidates relate to one another. I can safely assume they hate each other. No news there.

No, I want to see how they respond to real voters who want to talk about the issues, hurts, and hopes that will really be on their minds when they enter the booth – voters who had the chance to arm themselves with actual facts and to hear how issues look from their fellow voters’ perspectives.

Put each candidate in a quiet room (no audience of partisans ignoring the orders not to clap or boo) with 10 voters who have a set of questions relating to the evening’s theme. Let a voter ask a question, respond to the candidate’s response, then give at least two other voters a chance to chime in with their followups.

Rinse and repeat, while all the while a hidden team of reputable fact-checkers from multiple outlets feeds factual analysis onto secure tablets each voter has been supplied. At the end, the voters get a chance to question the candidate about any fact-checking concerns that arise.

Then, usher out the one candidate, bring in the opponent, and repeat the process with the citizen questioners covering similar ground, but with questions tailored to that candidate’s record and campaign platform.

Over three versions of this, with a different theme each night, the process should cover a lot of the average voter’s concerns. It should give ample opportunity for regular voters (not “snide,” “arrogant,” “biased” superstar journalists) to call candidates on their bullshit. Importantly, it will show how a candidate, in a pressure-packed, unpredictable situation for which it is far more difficult to concoct a script, relates to the ordinary Americans he or she presumes to lead.

So, that’s my idea (with due thanks to Jim Fishkin). What do you think?

….

I hope you read Dick Polman’s piece this week about the Democratic state senator from Michigan who just gave a viral master class in how liberals should reclaim faith-based values from the faux Christians on the judgmental, hypocritical right.  Just saying, but in my way I’ve been saying similar things ever since Dick lent me his soapbox once a week – as in here, here and here.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia