Now that the presidential debate process is taking a 1-month hiatus, it’s a good time to consider whether the Republican debates have exerted too much influence over the GOP contest.
Have they really focused on what the U.S. agenda will be for 2013-17?
Clearly, the 19 debates have been entertaining and attracted large TV audiences. No one can argue that the amount of voter interest in these face-to-face events is about as high as ever. And that’s a good thing.
But I wonder if voters put too much emphasis on the debates. It seems that many conservatives gravitated to Newt Gingrich largely because he scored points as a tough guy at the debates. Other candidates, like Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman, never had a chance.
Sure, debates show a candidate’s command of the issues, his ability to think fast on his feet, and his natural instincts to present a confident, authoritative presence. All of those are important characteristics for a president. But many of our most recent presidents fell short in some of those categories and were, in fact, fairly poor public speakers.
I would put Nixon, Carter, Johnson and George H.W. Bush in that category. Bush, in particular, was a poor debater, one who provided Saturday Night Live plenty of comedy material. But he was a strong, solid president.
One American tradition which is too often ignored is that every four years we as a nation look back and realize that so little discussed feverishly in the last campaign mattered much. Big issues, serious problems, that arose on each president’s watch were those that were left in the shadows during the prior political contest for the White House.
Tom Friedman of the New York Times recently wrote about how fun – and irrelevant – the GOP debates have become.
Friedman convincingly makes the case that the Republican candidates suffer from a massive disconnect from one of the most sweeping changes on the globe – an IT revolution that is “giving individuals more and more cheap tools of innovation, collaboration and creativity — thanks to hand-held computers, social networks and ‘the cloud,’ which stores powerful applications that anyone can download.”
In short, the competition facing the American business community is now everywhere. And one of the most effective ways for the U.S. to fight back is through the creation of “business clusters” where entrepreneurs and academia work closely (literally) to create new products – and generate jobs by the thousands.
These clusters could be fed by super fast broadband that can handle what the future brings. One estimate indicates that there will be 44 times as much online data and content coming over the next decade, reaching 35 zettabytes in 2020, according to Friedman.
A zettabyte is a 1 followed by 21 zeros.
Experts say that the U.S. falters by concentrating on finally bringing broadband to the most secluded rural areas of America. In comparison, South Korea intends to connect every home in that country to the Internet at one gigabit per second. That would be a tenfold increase from the already blazing national standard, and more than 200 times as fast as the average household setup in the United States.
So, Friedman wonders why the candidates are never asked at a debate about clusters and “smart cities” and bandwidth. Because whoever occupies the Oval Office in 2013 will surely have to tackle that issue over the next four years.
Take a few minutes to read Friedman’s column here. You’ll learn a lot.

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