Recall candidates untested, voters uninformed

Arnold Schwarzenegger does not strike me as a very smart guy.
This week he declined to debate Gov. Gray Davis in front of a
national audience on “Larry King Live.” In this past
Wednesday’s debate, for which the candidates conveniently had
the questions given to them in advance, Schwarzenegger did not
venture far from the rehearsed responses and standard facts on
which he has relied throughout his campaign. He spewed catch
phrases and insults toward Arianna Huffington more often than he
spoke original ideas and thoughts.

Pundits can argue endlessly about whether Schwarzenegger
performed well enough to impress California voters, but for me, the
final verdict of the debate is this: Because Wednesday’s
debate is the only one that will feature Schwarzenegger and because
the debate did not give viewers insight into his unrehearsed
intellect and problem-solving skills, I will be an ignorant voter
on Oct. 7, 2003.

I don’t know much about Schwarzenegger or any of the other
gubernatorial candidates, and therein lies one of the greatest
tragedies of modern politics ““ that a candidate can be
elected without being truly tested.

To give you a better idea of what I mean, let’s travel
back in time. The year is 1858, and the place is Illinois. That
year, a relatively unknown politician named Abraham Lincoln
campaigned against a well-liked incumbent named Stephen Douglas in
a race for the U.S. Senate. Although Lincoln lost the Senate seat,
he made a name for himself by challenging Douglas to a series of
debates in each of the state’s Congressional Districts
““ which helped pave his way to the U.S. presidency.

These were not your one or two-and-a-half-hour long, receive the
questions in advance, let me get my team of advisors, spin doctors
and pollsters to help me come up with just the right answers kind
of debates. Lincoln and Douglas debated each other seven times.
They didn’t speak in sound bites; they spoke in paragraphs.
They gave the voters not only their original ideas, but
justification for those ideas and plans for their implementation. I
think the voters in 1858 had a pretty good idea who their
prospective senators were and for what each stood.

Fast forward to 2003 in California. Voters are enmeshed in their
own ignorance. How smart is Arnold Schwarzenegger? I don’t
know. Can the candidates come up with intelligent ideas and plans
for their implementation without a team of career politicians
supporting them? I don’t know. Which candidate would perform
the best in a pressure situation if an unforeseen crisis arises in
the state? I don’t know. Instead of having a familiarity with
candidates that should be off the charts in this information age,
voters are making a decision based on what is essentially a contest
of bragging and self-aggrandizement.

The way we’re choosing our next governor of California is
akin to a baseball coach choosing his team by listening to players
yell about how many home runs they can hit without watching them
play.

So, I have some ideas about how to force candidates to prove
their worth before they take the oath of office.

First, all major candidates should be compelled to participate
in three two-hour town hall meetings during which they would each
be asked questions from randomly chosen audience members. That way,
preparation would be much more difficult, and voters would have a
better sense of how candidates think on the fly ““ which is
what really separates the men from the boys (or the women from the
girls, as the case may be).

Second, if candidates must have debates during which they give
prepared responses, they should have to answer those questions by
themselves ““ with a time limit. After being asked a question
similar to those asked at Wednesday’s debate, the candidates
would each have one hour to go into a room alone and write as
thorough a response as possible. After that hour they would have to
submit and read their response to a television audience. I’d
love to see how the terminator would handle that.

Third, to simulate what it would be like to have a real crisis
on their hands, candidates would be given a hypothetical problem,
such as, “The actual deficit is going to be $10 billion more
than the projected deficit. What immediate measures would you take
to stop the state from descending into further economic
turmoil?” The candidates would then have three days to answer
the problem with help from a group of a few advisors and submit
their responses to newspapers throughout the state.

If the current gubernatorial candidates had to go through even
one of these steps before election day, I think Californians would
be ensured a better governor than we will probably have after Oct.
7. Unfortunately, time is running out, and we may soon have an
untested, inadequate leader at the helm of the nation’s most
important state.

Burke is a fifth-year political science student and a former
Viewpoint editor.