Bitter Patter.(The Talk of the Town)(Philadelphia primary debate)

Last Wednesday's two-hour televised smackdown in Philadelphia between the two remaining Democratic candidates for President, which might have been billed as the Elite Treat v. the Boilermaker Belle, turned into something worse--something akin to a federal crime. Call it the case of the Walt Disney Company v. People of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (and of the United States, for that matter). Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time.

None of the other debates had been models of philosophic rigor. But, right from the start, there were clues that the sponsor of this one--ABC News, a part of the ABC network, which is owned by Disney--might establish new benchmarks of degradation. After brief opening statements from the candidates, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, ABC immediately cut to an advertisement for a cell-phone company. A commercial? Already? Were candidates for President of the United States being used as teasers?

After the break, one of ABC's moderators, Charles Gibson, asked Clinton and Obama to "pledge now" that whichever of them wins the Presidential nomination take the runner-up as his or her running mate. ABC put on the screen a solemn quote from the Constitution (they were at the National Constitution Center, get it?)--the bit where it says, "In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President."

It happens that this part of the Constitution was scrapped after the election of 1800. It should no more be cited as evidence of the framers' wisdom than should the equally defunct passage calling for "three fifths of all other Persons"--i.e., slaves--to count toward congressional apportionment. It also happens that Gibson's question was not only premised on nonsense but also profoundly unhelpful, because the only answers it could elicit would be both predictable and substance-free. And so they were.

If Gibson and his partner, George Stephanopoulos, had halted their descent at the level of the fatuous, that would have been bad enough. But there was worse to come. In the seven weeks since the previous Clinton-Obama debate, the death toll of American troops in Iraq had reached four thousand; the President had admitted that his "national-security team," including the Vice-President, had met regularly in the White House to approve the torture of prisoners; house repossessions topped fifty thousand per month and unemployment topped five per cent; and the poll-measured proportion of Americans who believe that "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track" hit eighty-one per cent, a record. Yet for most of the next hour Gibson and Stephanopoulos limited their questioning to the following topics: Obama's April 6th remark about "bitter" small-towners; whether each candidate thinks the other can win; the Obama family's ex-pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.; Clinton's tale of sniper fire in Bosnia; Obama's failure to wear a flag lapel pin; and Obama's acquaintance with a college professor in his Chicago neighborhood who, while Obama was in grade school, was a member of the Weather Underground. And the problem wasn't just the questions' subject matter, or the fact that all but the last had been thoroughly raked over already; it was their moral and intellectual vacuity. "Number one, do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?" That was Stephanopoulos. (His follow-up: "But you do believe he's as patriotic as you are?") The idea was to force Obama either to denigrate Wright's patriotism or to equate it with his own. Obama's exasperation showed, though he slipped the trap by pointing to Wright's service in the Marines. One question--"I want to know if you believe in the American flag"--was apparently beneath the dignity of even Gibson and Stephanopoulos, so ABC hunted up a purportedly typical voter to ask it on videotape.

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