Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, February 05, 2010

More on the Idea of an American Tradition of Regular, Public, Unscripted Question Time With the Opposition

You know, it hasn't always been this way, and it need not always be this way, and the country would benefit immeasurably if it were no longer this way, but for now and for too long to be a Republican has meant too often to be a stupid scoundrel, possibly an actually insane person, and very probably an outright asshole.

While it is obvious that in the short term Question Time can only benefit Democrats given how intelligent, charming, commanding and generous President Obama tends to be in such situations, and given how readily this gives the lie to the GOP narratives that depend on fantastic declarations that Obama is instead a fulminating Comminazi incapable of uttering a word without a teleprompter and all the rest of that nonsense.

But it is the longer term benefit of a Question Time tradition that I find far more exciting. I think the institution of the Presidency, but also quite straightforwardly, I think the institution of the Republican Party could only benefit from what it would mean to know that no Republican with Presidential aspirations could avoid the awareness that she or he would be expected as part of their job to face policy questions under real-time public scrutiny from members of the opposition party on a very regular basis, with no handlers, with no scripts, with no net.

In your heart you know that George W. Bush, the Killer Clown, would never have run for the Presidency, nor would his cynical handlers have contemplated trying such a thing, if it were known that there was a firm tradition and expectation that every President, as part of his job, would face frequent, public, real-time televised, unscripted question and answer sessions with the opposition party -- that is, an expectation so strong that the damage to Presidential capital in shirking the tradition would be as devastating as the worst that could happen in Question Time itself. It is hard to imagine that, freighted with such expectations, the McCain campaign would have risked inflicting, off the cuff as it were, an atrocity exhibition like Sarah Palin on the American people via a one superannuated and grinch-wizened heartbeat away from the President Vice-Presidential pick.

I don't doubt that like everything else this would be gamed and gotcha'd here and there, but I also think there would be a real tendency to make such sessions reasonably cordial and substantive over the long term, for fear of backfires, fact-checking, and a vulnerability to looking petty or disrespectful or, frankly, stupid if one indulged in bad behavior.

I think we would all benefit -- Democrats and Republicans alike, citizens and non-citizens alike -- from an American Presidency that demanded this particular skill-set, whatever the party in the White House.

When the Founders crafted the Executive Branch many worried at the time, and many others often since, about its susceptibility to taking on an imperial coloration. They were clearly right to do, although they hardly could have predicted the role of mass-mediated celebrity as a vector easily as facilitative to such an imperializing Presidency as the vector enabled through the Executive's constituted and now ever-ramifying War Powers.

Question Time, it seems to me, would function as a countervailing mass-mediated check on the otherwise only-consolidating celebrity-aura conferred on the President, who in her or his singularity and uniquely national electoral mandate almost irresistibly assumes the status of the face of a nation whose agency resides not in the White House in fact but instead in the hundreds of millions of American people whose government this is of by and for, peer to peer.

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