With many millions of dollars traded for the privileges of hosting the debates and advertising during them, the point becomes more about making the audience available to corporations than about making the candidates available to the audience. The debates are, in part, advertisements for the medium. The moderators are almost always journalists from the channel or outlet hosting the debate, and not, for example, constitutional lawyers, or presidential historians, or economists, or tax policy experts, or foreign policy academics or climate scientists. Why not have a debate moderated by a panel of governors and mayors, or former congressional aides, or soldiers or data privacy activists?

It’s true that we occasionally do get seemingly unscripted moments in presidential debates. But those moments reveal, at best, candidates’ capacity to think on their feet, not in a moment of national crisis, but on television under high-powered lights, a live audience and time limits. It’s not an entirely irrelevant skill for a chief executive, but it’s also not the only one we should be testing. What about the need to read and absorb a great deal of information quickly and make decisions about it? Or manage a staff of experts? Or communicate diplomatically with foreign leaders? Imagine a series of debates in which each candidate, surrounded by a handful of chosen staff members, competed to prepare and persuade us of a policy proposal based on a surprise scenario rolled out by the moderators, a kind of “The Great British Baking Show” for politics. Or a briefing book challenge, ranking candidates by their executive summaries after 15 minutes of on-camera skimming.

There are so many possible solutions to the problems that plague today’s debates. They could be hosted and managed by organizations that are not in the profit business (hello, C-Span). We could remove the video component of debates, using still photos or nothing at all, to remove the attention to clothes (especially those of female candidates), hairstyles, shakes and sweats. We could make the debates boring, allowing candidates to drone on and on. Alternatively, we could ensure that all existing information about their platforms and proposals is readily available online, by mail or to watch at an earlier time, and allow only talks that add something new to the discussion.

Part of the problem is that we haven’t really decided what we’re looking for in a president, a position that combines head of state with chief executive. We are interested in certain kinds of personality or character traits while disclaiming the importance of others. We claim to want managerial competence, but evidence of that rarely makes it into any part of a campaign. We might care about their policy choices, but it’s hard for most laypeople to gauge how successful a candidate is likely to be at instituting those policies in our complicated government structure. We want candidates who are polished and media-ready, but also distrust them, worrying that they’ve been through too many focus groups and consultants to show us their real selves.

Televised debates thrive in this gray area, playing off the celebrity aura of candidates and sensationalizing superficial flaws while getting virtue points for participating in the democratic process. They pretend they are doing a civic service, while pivoting the process entirely to their own interests — something that could be said about many of the actors in our political ecosystem. And they’re staggeringly unimaginative about how they do it. Our world is full of dazzling potential for effectively communicating information; we should be harnessing some of it for our elections.

Malka Older (@m_older) is an affiliated research fellow with the Center for the Sociology of Organizations at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. She is the author of “The Centenal Cycle” trilogy and the short story collection “ … and Other Disasters.”

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