Whither persuadability?

This is an election year, and in past elections there has been a veneer, at least, of the candidates engaging in real "debates" in an attempt to persuade picky voters to vote for them.

Richard Nixon, on left,
and John Kennedy

In 1960, we had the first televised presidential debate, Sen. John F. Kennedy (D) versus Vice President Richard M. Nixon (R). TV viewers decided they approved more of Kennedy than Nixon, and Kennedy went on to win the election by a razor-thin margin. The state of Illinois fell narrowly into his column, giving him a win in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

I remember that debate. It was about the issues — many of which I, as a 13-year-old, was clueless about.

Now, when we have "debates," candidates are drilled to slide off the issues whenever they don't fit into their rhetorical playbooks. The issues morph into talking points about how fine a candidate "I" am and how lousy "the other guy" is. It's campaign ads brought to life in the utterances of the candidates themselves — and it's virtually idea- and policy-free.

That's because the candidates think — and they're quite right about this — that nobody out there in TV land is persuadable. There are no rational arguments that could be brought up that would convince the voters to adopt a different point of view than the one they had going into the debate.

So watching a "debate" today is more about catching candidates in gaffes than about revising one's thinking.

Barack Obama

If I'm Barack Obama, I might wish I could persuade the unpersuaded in the electorate to vote for me because the programs I espouse for bringing down health care costs, or dealing with taxes and the budget, or coping with global warming and America's energy future are the best ones for the country.

Mitt Romney

If I'm Mitt Romney, I might hope the unpersuaded could be brought by my sensible arguments to agree with me about the need to get rid of senseless federal regulations that hamper our economic recovery.

Problem is: nobody out there is persuadable.

Nobody out there is willing to grapple with the issues in a rational way that opens the door to possible conversions in voting behavior.

Everybody out there — with the possible exception of a thin sliver of independent voters — is dug into hardened ideological trenches and won't ever budge.

And that thin sliver of independent voters and of the otherwise unpersuaded don't really matter, except in the possibly 8 or 12 "swing states" in the nation. If I'm unpersuaded in Maryland, where Obama is going to win hands down, it matters not at all whether one candidate or the other "moves the needle" for me personally in a televised "debate."

One state to the north, in Pennsylvania, "moving the needle" is indeed important, since Pennsylvania is a swing state with a lot of electoral votes at stake. The candidates desperately want to capture the independents and undecideds in Pennsylvania. Yet they have to do so while not alienating their "base." If the base stays home on election day, any gains in the middle will be for naught.

What brings the base reliably out? Not rational consideration of policy alternatives, which after all might cut against liberal or conservative shibboleths. So an Obama or a Romney needs to stick to a rhetorical script that energizes the base, while tossing out ill-defined scraps that just might sway the undecideds in the middle.

Is that any way to run an election?