Presidential Debate #3: Confessions of a Live-Tweeter

by Emily Gertz

Published October 15, 2008 @ 08:55AM PST

Will tonight's third and last presidential debate offer any new insights into which senator,  Barack Obama or John McCain, would make the better president ?  And what's left for bloggers to contribute to the  public discussion?

The quality of the debate itself could go either way.  Here's what Slate has to say:

Barack Obama, John McCain, and Schieffer [CBS news reporter Bob Schiffer, the debate moderator] will be seated at a table. This is far preferable to the podium format, for both heat and light. It's much harder to deliver well-worn talking points when you're sitting right next to your opponent and a moderator than when you're at a podium, which invites bloviation. It permits Schieffer to look into a candidate's eyes from just a foot or two away and press him for an answer. And, counterintuitive though it may be, it actually can encourage sharper confrontations.

Politico.com is more skeptical:

Even the co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates admits the first two debates have been oddly non-confrontational and lacking a “major screw-up or a major defining event.” ... Fahrenkopf blames the candidates for being overly cautious, but the lackluster debates — particularly last week’s meandering town hall at Nashville’s Belmont University — have prompted a backlash against the commission, which replaced the League of Women Voters as debate organizer in 1988. 

“What we’re getting now aren’t debates — they are parallel stump speeches,” says George Farah, founder of Open Debates, a bipartisan group that has sparred with the commission for years over its secretive rule-making pacts with candidates. “We need to really look at changing the system … anything that allows for an unrehearsed answer, anything that throws the candidates off their game and give them a human face.” 

Otherwise, most of today's pre-debate coverage is focused on the horserace: McCain has to "perform well" to save his campaign; Obama must "avoid mistakes" to get to the White House.   This reads more like a review of the local high school's production of The Music Man** than coverage of the most important presidential election of my lifetime.

I've done a bit of live-tweeting* this political season -- during the party conventions and the presidential debates. My initial goal was simply to build up some skill with the form, frankly -- part of my job as a 21st century journalist is to learn to use these tools.  

Then I got swept up into actually being a journalist online at this moment in time, with these tools.  It was so thrilling that my beat, environmental-qua-energy policy and global warming, was finally being discussed  before the entire nation in prime time, that I couldn't stop myself from getting online to fact-check and reality-check along with the rest of the political blog-o-tweet-o-sphere.

What I discovered is that at its best, Twitter is kind of like hanging out in your favorite bar with your favorite, smartest, wittiest friends and co-workers -- trying to be the first on top of a fudged fact, competing to make the best pun, gaining insight and new knowledge from each other as quickly as it takes to type out the next 140 characters and hit "return."  And our work is better for both this conviviality and the friendly competition.

Sometimes the quality of the production really does trump covering the issues: "Drill Baby Drill!" is smoke and mirrors in place of a rational national energy policy, and that needs to be exposed at every opportunity.  But go too far in that direction, and you leave yourself vulnerable to nationally-televised humiliation:

 

 

But blogging and twittering come down to words.  They are great media (in the sense of the internet, radio, newspapers or television being a medium -- a means to convey content) for reporting right away on what the candidates say, and then parsing the levels of truth and falsehood, typical politi-speak fudging vs. outright misrepresentation.  

And because they're ultimately about the words, we can choose to put our attention on the issues, instead of the sets, costumes, and choreography.

Especially when the candidates themselves ditch the scripts.

*[[What is live-tweeting, you ask?  It's a kind of blogging in real time during an event, using the online message service Twitter -- where my account is ejgertz. You can follow globalwarming.change.org from my Twitter service, in addition to my straight-to-Twitter messages.]]

**[[Yes, I was in my high school's production of The Music Man.]]