Why CNN is bound to flub the Republican presidential debate

CNN, which is hosting the second Republican debate Wednesday night, would very much like you to know that if you tune in, you'll see some action.

Moderated by Jake Tapper, with Dana Bash and conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt also asking questions, the debate is being planned for maximum confrontation between the candidates. "Let's draw the contrasts between the candidates, and have them fight it out over these policies," Tapper told The New York Times, adding that when Chris Christie and Rand Paul got into an angry back-and-forth over NSA spying in the first debate, it was "electric" and "illuminating." As the Times reporter put it, Tapper hopes "to create as many of those moments as possible."

Just what America needs: some bickering from its presidential candidates. Maybe they'll even come to blows!

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Perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, we do want the candidates to engage with each other, and it's important for primary voters to know where they actually differ on policy. And maybe we shouldn't judge TV people too harshly for wanting to create good TV, for as your high school English teacher taught you, conflict is the root of all drama. It's even possible that Tapper and his colleagues will encourage nothing more than a deeply substantive exploration of ideas.

But I can also promise you that there will be plenty of questions designed to produce conflict without regard to substance. You'll see it when one candidate is asked to respond to the meanest thing some other candidate has said about him or her, a question that is the functional equivalent of, "Let's you and him fight."

The unfortunate fact is that journalists, particularly television journalists, have an absolutely terrible record in primary debates, as their quest to create those dramatic moments leads them to ask questions that are either hostile or just simply inane, of the "What's your favorite Bible verse?" variety. That's why I've long argued that primary debates should be moderated by people sympathetic to the party in question. While you might not want a conservative radio host or a liberal writer to be a questioner in a general election debate, in the primaries they're the ones likely to get the most out of the candidates, since they'll have a deeper understanding of what matters to primary voters and where important points of ideological difference might lie. So my guess is that Hewitt — who has already demonstrated on his radio show that he sees it as his task to put the GOP candidates through their paces — will ask the toughest and most interesting questions.

Unfortunately, the most interesting questions aren't usually the ones that get replayed over and over when the debate is done. It's usually the screw-ups or episodes of intense hostility that are likely to persist, the "oops" moments that reporters will seize on as evidence that a particular participant is failing as a candidate. So it's important to remember that, particularly in this context, performing well as a candidate tells us very little about how one might perform as a president.

A successful president needs many qualities: intelligence, experience, judgment, compassion, foresight, principle, adaptability, and a dozen others you could name. But one of the things he doesn't need is to be good at the televised back and forth we call debates. A two-term president will have to do a few if he runs for re-election, but on every other one of the 2,920 days of his presidency, he will have no need for that particular skill.

You could say much the same about the entire campaign, of course. Most of what a candidate has to do well to win the presidency is unlike what he or she will have to do well to succeed in the White House. After all, almost everyone who reaches the Oval Office did an excellent job of running for the position, and that applies to those who turned out to be great presidents and those who turned out to be disasters.

Sure, it's fun to watch politicians get a little mean with one another, and if that's what people want, that's what the networks who air the debates are going to try to give them. Just don't forget how little most of it has to do with what we're actually looking for in a president.