An event will be staged tomorrow evening in which the two presidential candidates will appear on the same stage and will craft extemporaneous verbal responses to questions from a moderator or one another. It is being called a “debate,” but these extravaganzas bear little resemblance to the activity that dominated my life for fifteen years.

There are several different kinds of debate. The one that I participated in is the branch called by some “policy debate.” The essence of the activity is that a rather general topic is selected for the entire year. The affirmative team in each round presents a specific plan that addresses an aspect of the topic. The negative team has several potential strategies: attack the affirmative plan, present a plan of its own, or claim that the affirmative plan is not within the prescribed topic. The speeches are all timed. Anything said after the time limit is ignored. The emphasis is on the quality of the reasoning and the evidence, not on the style of delivery. Failing to address an important argument made by an opponent is a mortal sin. The debate is judged by one or more people who are experts not in the topic or in public speaking but in argumentation itself.

College debaters work unbelievably hard. Although I have a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and all of the course work for a PhD, I put in more time and learned more working on debate each year than I did for any of my degrees. Just to be clear: each year of college debate involved more than was required for a college degree. Debaters at the highest level become experts on a large number of subjects, and they learn that policy issues are always complicated. Debaters become accustomed to probing beneath the superficial treatments in the popular media to the underlying factors that are difficult to understand even for experts in the field. They learn to be able to read what those experts have written and to question both methodologies and conclusions.

The debaters that I coached in the early seventies were studying the issue of climate change before most people had even suspected that it was happening. They knew that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warmed the earth and that particulate pollution that reflected sunlight cooled it. They understood, at least to some degree, the way that natural feedback mechanisms sometimes exacerbated and sometimes offset the effects. They discovered the strengths and limitations of the computerized climate models. The point is that they learned that the issue was complicated, but they also knew how important it was that the right decisions be made before it was too late.

Here is another example. A debate team from a school in our district was running a case that had something to do with arson. Their arguments were almost entirely based on one study. We obtained a copy of the study, which had not been peer-reviewed, and discovered that it used parametric statistics not on the data itself but on its rank ordering. We put a lot of effort into developing a cogent explanation of why this subtle difference completely invalidated the conclusions of the authors.

The arguments presented in presidential debates, on the other hand, are by and large much less sophisticated. The quality of the evidence is generally low. Occasionally someone will throw in a statistic, but the degree of detailed analysis common in policy debates is absent. Candidates are understandably reluctant to waste precious air time on a wonkish analysis of the other person’s data. Instead they are looking for the best spot to insert their prepared “zingers.”

The tactics are quite different as well. Each candidate will almost certainly ignore much of what the other says. This alone would guarantee a loss in policy debate, but sticking to talking points is considered a key to success in politics even if it means ignoring the other person’s points. This drives former debaters such as myself crazy.

The candidates are not trying to present convincing policy arguments as much as they are striving to strike a chord that somehow resonates with voters. The primary objectives are to look presidential and not to say anything stupid. People who listened to the Kennedy-Nixon debates on the radio thought that Nixon won, but the people who saw the perspiration on Nixon’s lip and his five o’clock shadow on television preferred Kennedy. Ronald Reagan supposedly won the debates with his line “There you go again.” No one even remembers what those debates were about. Nixon and Kennedy spent a lot of time talking about the islands of Quemoy and Matsu. Did anyone base his/her vote on the policies toward these remote places?

I suppose that these “debates” are a little better than relying on staged personal appearances and darkly threatening TV spots as a way of defining the candidates. At least the debates force them to devote some time to particular questions rather than relying on catchphrases that can be fit into thirty-second commercials.

On the other hand, who really cares whether the president is a good debater? I don’t. Primarily I want someone who appoints honest and competent people. In addition, the president should be good at weighing evidence and opinion in times of a crisis, but I know of no reliable method of predicting that ability. I want someone who is unwilling to send the country to war without a really good reason and whose values are similar to mine. I could never have supported a war-monger like John McCain. I want a president who understands that the people and the cultures of the world are diverse and that occasionally good ideas come from overseas. I want a president who can do arithmetic in his head, understands probability and statistics, and is not baffled by large numbers.

I think that the public forums could be improved in a couple of ways. The media should recognize that the president’s main job is to appoint people. Why not ask for a list of cabinet appointees before the election? I for one would have appreciated learning that George W. Bush’s idea of a good Attorney General was John Ashcroft. Who would have suspected that?

My second idea is more revolutionary. Rather than force the presidential candidates to debate, let them present and defend detailed platforms in any format that they want to use. Give them each an hour or so to make their case on their own terms. If they want to let someone else do the talking, fine. Require every network to show these presentations. Then a week or two later, let each party present an official detailed rebuttal. I would watch these shows, but I suspect that most of the rest of the country would prefer to follow the adventures of Honey Boo Boo.