For the 2008 televised vice-presidential debate in the United States, Sarah Palin was opposite Joe Biden. Reportedly, she’d so frustrated the efforts of her team to get her on point with her arguments that they’d simply taught her 40 minutes’ worth of script. She says at one point, “I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear”, which is to say, I can’t answer the question unless it corresponds directly to a gobbet I prepared earlier.
The transcript is extremely revealing of the chemistry of political debate. When you put one agile politician, summoning his powers to answer the question, against one who has learned some patriotic lines by rote and has no intention of engaging with the questions, the whole thing is inert, its elements don’t connect. So nobody can win in the classic sense, which means the less impressive party has scored a victory by definition. You can commentate the life out of it, ask a sample of the audience for verdicts in real time, but you’ll never get to the heart of what happened because there was no button for “I got bored and stopped listening”.
