NEW YORK CITY -- I did not know that the American political classes were so wild for debates. Truth be known, we never hear much about debates or a politician's debating skills until about this point in a presidential campaign. Then, debating skills are boomed in the media as a very important element in presidential greatness.
Always it is assumed that the Democratic candidate, whoever that might be, is superior to the Republican. And so I have answered my own question. The presidential debates are deemed important because the liberal media -- the Kultursmog as we say -- can pollute credulous minds with the claim that the Democratic candidate was the winner. Superb -- maybe he can take his skills to the United Nations General Assembly and overwhelm the delegate from Monte Carlo. But in the real world of geopolitics, a honeyed syllogism is not worth much against armed might or a suicide bomber.
As Vice President Dick Cheney and vice presidential candidate John Edwards were spraying their vocal chords, applying their makeup and otherwise preparing to debate, I was at a very pleasant dinner party with one of the few people in America who can still be recognized as a great debater, William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review and the brainy combatant who set out over half a century ago to debate the ideas of modern American conservatism with the dominant liberal advocates.
In the 1950s, there really was a healthy respect for intellectual debate on college campuses and to some extent beyond the campus and in the public forums. Buckley with his wit, erudition and audacity quickly established himself as a debater of the top tier. In so doing, he advanced the ideas of a strong national defense, anti-communism, personal liberty and market economics into regions where appeasement, anti-anti communism and the welfare state were taken for granted.
As the decades have passed, debate has lost its popularity on campuses and in public forums, possibly because Buckley and his understudies fared so well. Yet Bill remains a keen student of debate, and so I questioned him about the drear of the recent debates. They really have not been all that scintillating or informative.