There comes a point in every election for the candidates to stop avoiding each other and have an old-fashioned southern-style duel. Well, not a “crazy” Zell Miller “I want to kill you” duel, but an intellectual duel.
Now that the conventions are over, we have enough information to decide if we think our presidential candidates and other elected officials can read speeches written by others off a teleprompter while looking steadfast, determined, intelligent, but not egghead smart, and leader-like… and like the kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with.
Those qualities are all fine and dandy, but it’s an entirely different ballgame when instead of the news media debunking your facts from the comfort of a television studio or editorial page, your arch enemy is 10 feet away, with 60 seconds for rebuttal.
I enjoyed sitting in the audience for Bush and Kerry’s convention speeches and annoyingly pointing out to the executive director of Smackdown Your Vote!, Gary Davis, every statement or fact that was misleading, taken out of context, or just out and out false. Now, with the presidential debates, we will get to see the candidates fight with each other! It’s reality TV at its best, and anything can happen because, as The Rock says, it’s live, Live, LIVE!
This is a great opportunity to gauge our future leader’s intelligence. It’s easy to hide a slow wit when your speeches are written for you, and you just have to read them. Take it from someone who’s in the business – those who work live television are almost always quick-witted people, because you don’t give a live feed to someone that, when rattled, could make everyone look bad. On the flip side, those who work taped shows are often just chimps with microphones.
But considering how much planning goes into the three upcoming presidential (and one VP),debates, even the rebuttals will be written and memorized, so we can only hope something wild and spontaneous, and not carefully crafted to manipulate us, will happen.
Because of these factors, historically these debates do not draw incredibly high viewership from the 18-30 Smackdown! demographic. That’s not a good thing if we’re trying to draw more young people into the political game.
Your humble voting advocates here at the WWE are on the case, however. We’ve devised a way to make these debates fun and entertaining and informative at the same time.
The first presidential debate is Thursday, September 30, at the University of Miami.
The night before, on Wednesday, September 29, the WWE will invade the University of Miami and put on the first-ever Smackdown Your Vote! Youth Debate, pitting the tag-team of Mick Foley and U of M student Tiffany Yelder against JBL and U of M student.Alex Acosta. These teams will each debate the veracity of the Bush, Kerry, and Nader platforms as they relate to young voters, with the substance coming mainly from the Bush, Kerry, and Nader responses to our 18-30 Voter Issues Paper.
I know what you are thinking; “Oh man, the WWE doing a substantive debate – this could be a train wreck, I’m watching.” Good, then tune in. It’s going to be a good time either way. Yours truly has been heavily involved in the planning of this groundbreaking event, and it has the Nowinski seal of approval.
You can see the debate inits entirety on “ABC News Now” at 10 p.m. on Wednesday, September 29.
That’s great about our debate is that we’ve got everything covered for good TV. We’ve got two brilliant entertainers that know their politics and will make most political pundits look like whiney bitches that have never been in a real fight (which I’m assuming is the truth anyway). We’ll be joined by a slew of our favorite politicians, including Congressmen Kendrick Meek (D-FL) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) Harvard’s own Florida State Senator David Aronberg (D-FL) and Florida State Representative David Rivera.
And the best part of all is that we’ll have actual, factual young students in the debate. If you’ve been reading my previous columns, you know that I don’t “appreciate” the job the presidential daughters have done in representing youth issues so far. The WWE has found some worthy representatives. I just returned from a mission with our members of the SDYV advance team to discover the best debaters that the University of Miami has to offer.
Yes, yes, I know you’re expecting the Harvard grad to insert some sort of joke here about the quality of the students at a perceived “party school,” and yes, I really wanted to do that, but frankly the students that we auditioned impressed me with the passion and clarity of their ideas, so out of respect I’m letting that opportunity slip.
For once I got to be on the other side of the interview table, sitting there with my notebook and pen, scribbling away every time they started talking just to make them nervous and asking pompous, inane questions to throw them off balance… then not paying attention when they answered.
Yet despite my best efforts, some of them couldn’t be thrown off their game, and those are the students you’ll see at the debate. I think you’ll be impressed with the students we picked, and the voice that they will give to young people in America. To be real, we’re not there to pat the candidates on the back for doing a wonderful job addressing the issues of 18 to 30 year olds. This isn’t going to be the same partisan rhetoric you’ve been hearing for months.
We’re there to support the policies that support young people, because the ideas that support young people support a strong future for America. We’ll give credit where credit is due, but we’ll also blast holes through the issues that neither candidate is addressing well. And personally, I hope these debate teams take a bazooka to a few of the candidates’ answers that showed up in the VIP responses, because in a few places, it seemed like they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be young, poor, and independent.
Obviously, we’re not saying things loud enough because these political parties aren’t hearing us as well as we’d like them to. The Smackdown Your Vote debate on Wednesday, September 29, will give us an amazing opportunity to make our voices heard, and it will give our politicians a great chance to listen.
And when those two things happen, we’ll be one step closer.
Return to commentaries.