Voters should look beyond soundbites

There’s been a lot of talk in the past week about whether the young George W. Bush skirted his obligations in wartime or whether the young John F. Kerry undermined his nation’s unity during the Vietnam period. Let’s let others talk about the eighth decade of the 20th century.

This morning, our focus will be on the first decade of the 21st century and the things no one is talking about. The records of the leading figures in American political life are there for all to see. But that’s about the past.

I suspect I’m not alone in my thirst for a real conversation about the future in this election year.

I’m not asking for a debate. In fact, I’m sick to death of debates — the posing, the sighing, the lively ripostes, the clever “spontaneous” moments that were cooked up by aides and practiced for hours. The best presidential debates ever conducted were probably those of 1960, and not one of us remembers a single line either John F. Kennedy or Richard M. Nixon uttered. We remember only Nixon’s suit and his shave.

No, rather than a debate, I’m eager to hear long set-piece remarks by the presidential candidates that lay out what they think, not only about important issues but important themes in national life. Speeches that have beginnings, middles and ends. Addresses that have been thought through, analyzed, polished — really worked over.

The insights provided by the spontaneous remark are far overrated; we’d do better to examine the thoughts of someone who has taken the care required to make sure that every word counts and that every idea is developed fully.

Just because we’re used to a diet of quips and quick comments doesn’t mean we have to think that the act of governing requires a political figure to master the swift aside. If that were true, Jay Leno would be president and David Letterman would be secretary of state.

So for just a few moments I’m going to imagine that this election is an essay test rather than an exercise in performance art. Here are the topics I’d like to see the presidential candidates tackle. No answers with fewer than 5,000 words are acceptable:

l What is the nature of American society today? Is the culture too coarse? And is the bully pulpit of the presidency still an effective forum for influencing the manners and mettle of the public?

The vulgarity of the halftime show at the Super Bowl, in some ways the signature American moment, raises an important question, which we might summarize in the vernacular: Just how low will we go? Bush and all the Democratic candidates have talked about values. I’d like to hear a president, or a presidential candidate, talk about whether he thinks values are the proper province of politics and, just as important, whether a president can nurture values in a diverse nation of nearly 300 million people. Be specific.

l How should the nation decide which fights around the globe are our fights, which values are worth fighting for, and whether — or when — we ought to impose our will on the unwilling?

Neither Bush nor the Democrats have delivered a comprehensive and comprehensible answer to this question. They haven’t shown the nation, or the world, how their minds work when American values are in jeopardy in places where American interests are not at issue, or the reverse. They haven’t scratched the surface of the question of whether American values are transferable or whether they are the product of our cultural milieu, our geographic isolation or the period of time in which our institutions were conceived. They haven’t tackled the question of whether political ideas that were the product of the 18th-century Enlightenment are applicable to nations, or splinter groups, or tiny groups of the aggrieved that are coming of age now, in a new millennium.

l What is the nature of life, who can create it, and who decides?

For a generation our politics has applied this question to abortion, and though the nation has not resolved the question, political figures deserve credit for taking the question seriously and, for the most part, answering it precisely.

But that’s no longer good enough. For all the importance of the events in Tennessee and Virginia last week, and in Wisconsin this week, the most important event of February 2004 is likely to have occurred in South Korea, where researchers produced human embryos and stem cells through cloning.

President Bush began a serious inquiry into the stem-cell issue in the month before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Much has occurred since then. He and the remaining presidential candidates ought to tackle this question with the profound care it deserves. They will be better for the exercise, which will tell us more about their religious impulses than any month of Sundays, and so will we.

l What can be done about the great chasms in American life — between rich and poor; between racial majority and minority; between host Americans and new Americans; between consumers of entitlement programs and the underwriters of entitlement programs; and between the governing class and the governed class?

We have many temporal issues in this country, and most of them fall under this rubric.

Candidate Nixon noticed a young woman holding a sign during his 1968 campaign that read: “Bring us together.” The country still yearns for that, not in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, not on the eve of wartime, but in the period, day after day after day, when nothing life-shattering is occurring in the nation but when national life is nonetheless being defined.

Memo to the candidates: Answer these questions and there will be no undecideds in November.


David Shribman is a columnist for Universal Press Syndicate.