A lot of college debate coaches will be asked to comment on presidential candidate debates. Most of those coaches will explain which candidate scored more points on the issues, who dealt directly with the arguments raised, and who would win if it were a college debate round.
This, by and large, is a meaningless exercise.
I was a moderately successful debater at Emerson College, and had some success as an assistant coach at Syracuse University and head coach at Clemson University. College debate, like political debates and debates about sports in bars, do not exist in the abstract.
Debates have winners and losers. In college the winner gets an ugly trophy. In sports the winner gets bragging rights or a beer. In either case, someone is up and another down. If there is a winner there are criteria by which winning is judged.
In most contests those criteria is clear and objective. In soccer it’s the most times the ball goes into the net (unless you’re Watford), in politics it’s whoever gets the most votes (unless you’re Gore). These criteria work because all of the players, referees and fans agree on them. We all know the rules going in and know how the rules will be applied – that’s why Reading’s phantom goal against Watford and Gore’s win-but-loss were so troubling, they violated the criteria on which we all agreed.
Such is not the case in debate. There is no agreed upon universal criteria for all debates. The criteria are determined by the audience in a context. The point of a debate is to persuade an audience. There is not universal audience for debate, there is no universal objective criteria for persuasion. As Aristotle wrote in The Rhetoric (and as I’ve noted in this space before), something is persuasive “because there is somebody whom it persuades.” (Book I, Chapter 2).
College debate is a weird little world in which undergraduates dump data at each other as fast as they can; the winner is the one with most facts left at the end. The audience – the judge – is typically a coach from another team whose own debaters are yelling facts in another room. The criteria for that audience are agreed upon and work – for that audience in that context.
Of course that’s not what presidential candidate debates are about. The audiences for McCain are the conservatives he needs to keep energized and the undecided voters who may feel uneasy about Obama. Winning this group has nothing to do with facts or how quickly he can talk. Obama’s audience are undecided voters who are unsure that he is ready to be Commander in Chief – again, that can’t be achieved by reading random facts as fast as possible. Looking to college debate coaches for insight on candidate debates is a bit like asking Olympic gymnastics judges to judge diving – both are subjective, but the criteria for each couldn’t be more different.
