This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

I must confess that I have not watched one political debate this election season, though I have read about them in newspapers.

Seems I haven’t missed much.  At least much that helps anyone – me, for example — decide how to vote.

Of course, I, like many of you remember watching various presidential debates when, for example:

• The elder George Bush made the mistake of checking his watch while he was on camera, as if to say, “are we done yet?” 
• In a vice-presidential debate, when Democrat Lloyd Bentsen skewered Republican Dan Quayle, by uttering a phrase which has lived since he said it in 1988, “Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.”
• Or, back in 1960, when Jack Kennedy came across on TV far better than did the wan Richard Nixon.

As memorable occasions, these actually did not add much to my decision, back then, about how to vote.

Then, for today, Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman captured this reality yesterday when he wrote under this headline:  “Why candidate debates are so awful — and how to fix them.”

Here is how he started his column:

“This has been a big week for the mid-term elections, as debates among Senate and gubernatorial candidates were held in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Colorado.  There has been plenty of discussion about which candidates won, who had the worst ‘gaffe,’ what will show up in campaign ads, and whether it will all affect the election outcome.”

Which, he contended, “is exactly why candidate debates, as they’re practiced, are utterly terrible, both for voters and for democracy”

“The best you can say about them is that when most voters see the candidates in only 30-second TV ads or one-minute online videos, debates offer the most extended look we get at them.  But everything about the debates’ format — which is almost identical in every race, as though it has been handed down on stone tablets — makes them worse.”

Waldman contends that, at their most fundamental level, “debates are terrible because it is now taken for granted that they should be seen as a performance, meaning we judge the candidates as though they were figure skaters at the Olympics.  Oops, Mehmet Oz bobbled the landing on that triple salchow, that’s a major deduction!  Why would we think this helps us understand who would do a better job in office?”

The fact is, Waldman add, debates are unlike anything officeholders will do in their job, until two or four years into a job when they run for re-election and debate again.  

He offers a prescription for meaningful change.

• Let the candidates sit down.
• Let them bring notes.  Whether a candidate remembers all eight points of his or her economic plan at a moment of stress is less important than whether the plan is a good one.
• Focus on a single-issue area — economics, public safety, domestic programs, climate change — so we can explore ideas in depth rather than skating over dozens of areas without much substance.
• And, for the journalists who participate:  Forget about surprising the candidates, or encouraging them to attack each other, or asking why one of them is struggling in the polls, or creating dramatic moments.

Which brings us, Waldman continues, to perhaps the most fundamental problem with debates:  They’re constructed around the needs and preferences of the already shallow way campaigns are conducted.

“Few voters watch the debates.  Instead, they see snippets that get re-played on the news or in ads.  Which means that the debate gets reprocessed through the news media, with all their pathologies.

“If you were a candidate with a compelling argument about health-care reform that takes three or four minutes to lay out, but you knew that all people would ever see of it is an eight-second clip, what would you do? You would distill it to a single zippy sentence, even if that sentence couldn’t begin to explain your full argument.

“What if you further knew that clips that get played on the news almost always involve conflict, the nastier the better?  You would forget about your compelling argument and come up with a clever insult to toss at your opponent.  Which is exactly what they do.”

The only appropriate response is, Waldman says, is “who cares?”

I agree. 

Unless debate formats change – and they are not likely to do so – I say choose another approach to decide how to vote.  Such as reading about public policy positions in various newspapers rather than watching and waiting for gaffes.