Critic: Russert to Blame for Many Debate Flaws

The Atlantic's James Fallows recently watched all 47 presidential debates from the current electoral cycle and came away with some thoughts about which newsmen made the best -- and worst -- moderators:

Wolf Blitzer was the most intrusive and self-aggrandizing. His CNN colleague Anderson Cooper, who moderated the YouTube debates for both parties with video questions from viewers, was at the other extreme, with a nice combination of assertiveness and good-humored restraint. Along with Cooper, the other moderator who best kept control without hogging the stage was Brian Williams of NBC.... Yet it was the smooth, non-histrionic Williams who put the candidates through a series of stunts.

The "stunts" in question refer to the practice, initiated by Williams and emulated by his peers, of asking candidates to raise their hands in response to yes/no questions -- even questions that called for a considerable degree of nuance. Fallows says he would ban such questions, which make would-be Presidents of the United States looking "like grade-schoolers or contestants on Fear Factor."

In addition to show-of-hands questions, he also excoriates the use of loaded hypotheticals, gotchas, lightning rounds and demands for candidates to take a pledge on some issue. It's an "awkward fact," he says, that most of these pernicious elements can be traced back to one figure: the late Tim Russert.

The generous personality that made Russert so popular, and the encyclopedic political knowledge that made him so influential, meant that he was imitated when he set a bad example as well as a good one. His questioning mode during the debates was mostly unfortunate. In two important, back-to-back Democratic debates last fall--in Hanover, New Hampshire, in September and Philadelphia in October--nearly every question he asked was from the categories above.

Meanwhile, Fallows has a surprisingly forgiving take on the must-maligned performance of Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos in the final debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama:

When I'd seen this final debate in real time, I'd been outraged by its harsh tone and belated attention to policy matters (including Gibson's little lecture to the candidates on why capital-gains tax cuts always paid for themselves). When I saw its place in the series, I realized it was like a late episode of The Sopranos in which nearly everyone gets mowed down. It was violent and dehumanizing, but it was the culmination of a long process.