Oliver Bateman Does the WorkVerified account

i was a debater for many years, taught debate and forensics, and can say this about the way we do these presidential debates: 1) there's no way to "win" them 2) at most you can mouth platitudes 3) people remember one-liners and weird facial tics/fashion gaffes and little else

moot court is a bland, boring format that favors fact memorizers with smooth-jazz radio host voices, like ted olson and ted cruz, but these roundtable debates favor goofballs who say wacky, meme-able shit. looking for "substance" here is a no-go

think about your own presentations. how well, esp. as you age, can you remember facts "off-book" or "off-powerpoint?" probably poorly. i'm good, v. good in fact, but nothing i say is as precise as if i were fact-checking it while i typed it. and so the debates fail here too

candidates, with the exceptions of these overpowering loony bin personalities, are interchangeable. at most they represent some local/community interest of yours, so you can tick off that box. the ones with truly radical policies will never make it to the big stage.

and the idea that some candidate's policy paper or "command of facts" can make a difference...again, think about your own shaky memory, absent a quick trip to ol' wikipedia (which i vandalize so often my changes now appear in books) or politifact, which has its own odd agenda

much of this, in the "serious" elections, especially within the primaries of parties in which people agree on the basics, reduces to some debate about whether chocolate teddy grahams are better than honey teddy grahams, and you can't argue a person into liking honey teddy grahams

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