The television commentators were disappointed in the first Ford-Carter debate. In their instant analysis and Monday morning quarterbacking, they complained that the debate was a dull show; it lacked excitement and even spontaneity. The candidates didn’t say anything new; they merely rehashed what they had been saying for months on the campaign trail.
I think that is exactly what the debate should have been! A nationally televised debate is no time for creative thinking or trial balloons. The debates should have been a distillation of ideas and programs that each candidate had thought deeply about, studied, and tried out on local audiences until he has had enough feedback to be sure that those ideas are worth presenting to a national audience.
Some television commentators suggested that the debate format could be improved by allowing the candidates to question or interact with each other, or by allowing second rebuttals, so that Ford and Carter would both have to address the same issue.
That’s a good objective, but it’s the wrong approach. As a voter, I am not interested in how President Ford interacts with Governor Carter, but I am intensely interested in how each candidates interacts with and confronts the major issues of the day. A better format for subsequent debates would be to give each candidate three minutes to respond to each of a dozen prepared questions. This would compel both candidates to speak to the same issue, and evasions would be obvious.
The principal defect of the first debate was not the format or what the candidates said, but what they didn’t say. They failed to come to grips with the question of how to reduce Federal spending in order to cut back on either Federal taxes or the inflation-causing deficit, or both.
For example, how about presenting a responsible plan to eliminate the waste, extravagance, and fraud that exists in so many Federal agencies today? Nearly every month, there is a new example of bureaucratic rip-offs of our tax dollars through wrong payments and overpayments, caused by reasons that range from fraud to red tape.
The Moss Subcommittee discovered that up to one-half of the $15 billion spent each year on Medicaid is wasted through fraud, overcharging, treatment for nonexistent ills, fee-splitting, kickbacks, and poor administration.
The General Accounting Office spent a year investigating and studying the operations of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In a 72—page report last month, the GAO substantiated earlier newspaper charges that RUD is a $4 billion scandal.
The GAG report described how HUD has destroyed property values and wrecked whole neighborhoods by its practice of financing homes that are eyesores and health and safety hazards. These abandoned homes are detrimental to the neighborhood because teenagers use them for partying, vagrants hide out in them, and others use them as dumping spots for debris, garbage, and dead dogs.
The list is endless of Federal programs that are plagued with bureaucratic cost overruns, inefficiency and fraud. It includes welfare, student guaranteed loans, food stamps, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and the billions doled out every year in giveaways to a hundred foreign countries.
In the first debate, the presidential candidates talked vaguely about how they might try to save money years into the future, maybe. I want to hear from a candidate who promises to cut spending now.
