My old pal Bob Reich probably wasn't much impressed with AZ Gov. Jan Brewer's debate, er, "performance"

Will Arizona voters hold it against their accidental governor that in her debate

opening

statement she had literally nothing to say?

by Ken

I'm not sure whether I've told this story here, but when I told it to Howie not long ago, he didn't seem to remember, and it's pertinent to an evaluation of Governor Brewer's debate, er, performance.

In Lettermanesque terms, I guess this would be my "Brush With Greatness." As a college freshman I made a limited round of "student activities" which included a drop-in on the debating society. That seemed up my alley, since I was (a) politically immersed and (b) as argumentative as the next guy. (The next guy would probably say, "More, oh more.") Having no experience of formal debate, I just assumed you got to go head-to-head with other loudmouths on subjects dear to your heart, and just somehow somebody kept score. Wrong!

I had no idea that in any given year every debater in the country (a) was debating the same topic, and (b) was debating both sides of the topic. As it happened, the topic that year related to the expansive definition of civil liberties wrought by the Warren Court. Chief Justice Earl Warren himself was still on the Court at the time, with three years to go till he submitted his retirement to President Lyndon Johnson, in an attempt to guard against having his replacement chosen by likely Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon. It wasn't Warren's fault that the plan went haywire when Johnson tried to promote Associate Justice Abe Fortas to the chief's seat, eventually leaving two Court vacancies for (sure enough) President Nixon to fill.

The topic, which as I recall is always in the form of a resolution, was something like: "Resolved that the Commie-dominated Supreme Court's coddling of criminals has gone too far." Okay, that may not have been the exact wording, but that's sure how I heard it. And I would have had no trouble building up a good head of argumentative steam on the topic, as long as I would have been arguing against it. The idea that I would spend half my time as a debater, and more important as a debate researcher (we'll come back to this sticky point), arguing in favor of the proposition can fairly be said to have boggled my mind. What kind of sophistry was this?

I suppose it's great training for lawyers, who presumably have to be prepared to argue either side of most any proposition. I don't know, I suppose it somehow expands one's capacity to see all sides of an issue, having to argue both sides of any proposition. But heck, with a proposition like this, screw that! The Warren Court view of civil liberties inspired my political consciousness, and still does.

Now here's where it gets interesting: Given my total lack of experience of formal debating, I was assigned to begin with to the affirmative, for the simple reason that the affirmative debater opened the debate, meaning that his first argument could be wholly prepared, leaving only the second argument to be crafted according to what had been said to that point in the actual debate. And so, for the short time I stayed with the program, I was on the attack against the outrages of "Red" Warren and his fellow Court bolshies.

It may be that Bob Reich had less to do with this story than I made out at the top of this post, and I may have implied a somewhat more intimate relationship than the facts bear out. (I think "lying" would be a somewhat hysterical overreaction to what may constitute a tiny bit of exaggeration, or overstatement.) Where he comes into it is this.

At that time, in addition to being president of student government and one of the best-known people on campus, Bob was the guiding light of our debate society, or club, or whatever it was called. And to the extent that I had dealings with him, which could have been as extensive as my continued participation would have warranted, he simply couldn't have been more impressive. He was maybe the smartest person I'd ever met, and one of the hardest-working, and one of the least self-absorbed -- he seemed prepared to devote as much time (out of a schedule that must have been impossibly filled with extracurricular activities on top of his actual studies) as was called for to any fledgling debater who was prepared to roll up his sleeves and contribute to the endless grinding research of the year's topic which is essential to the well-being of any serious debate team.

By the time my assigned partner and I had two debates under our belt (one won, one lost), I'd had enough. Enough of the impassioned arguing of a position I considered untenable, enough of the unbearable tension of the debate experience itself, and enough of the exhortations to pitch in and do my share of that mind-numbing research for new arguments and citations for the team to use in all our debates. I hadn't bargained for that, and had no interest in it. Besides, I had my hands full squeezing out enough time to devote to avoiding doing classwork. (I turned out to be approximately as unindustrious a student in college as I had been in high school. Looking back, I'm kind of sorry about this. Alas, this is one of the infinite aspects of life for which there are no do-overs.)

So if you were expecting some dirt, or at least naughty confidences, regarding Bob Reich, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I'm sorry I wound up having so little contact with him. but on the basis of even that limited exposure, I might have guessed that this was a fellow who not only was going places but deserved to.

So I'm telling you that I can almost imagine Bob's response to Governor Brewer's flabbergasting performance in that lone debate she's allowing herself to participate in this election campaign for a first elected term as Arizona governor, a performance that Howie wrote about yesterday with such deserved disdain -- you know, the debate her staff explained she only participated in because she had to in order to score that $1.7 million in public campaign financing. And oh yes, the debate in which she spent an inordinate amount of time trying unsuccessfully to think of something to say.

The detail that really grabbed my attention in the accounts I read of the debate was that the governor's verbal participation first ground to a disastrous halt during her opening statement. WTF? During her opening statement? Based on my extensive experience of formal debate, all I could think of was: How the heck do you not know what you're going to say in your opening statement?

To be fair, I didn't bother to find out whether she was speaking first or second, and if she was speaking second, then there is at least some issue of incorporating what your opponent has said. Still, even in that case the basic thrust of the opening statement can surely be basically prescripted. And there was the accidental governor -- elevated to the job by line of succession as Arizona's secretary of state when Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano was tapped for the Homeland Security secretaryship in the Obama administration -- sucking air while the cameras rolled.

This by me is a lot more than the "gaffe" it's been widely described as being. Oh, I suppose it is a gaffe, which can be a really bad thing in a political culture that places such a high premium on gaffes. However, it's not clear that Arizona voters will exact any price for the fact that their incumbent governor apparently has nothing to say either about the job she's done or the job she hopes to do if elected. And it's not as if she had to prepare both sides of the issues, or indeed do any of the research herself. She just had to make some kind of case for her election.

Sometimes silence tells you all you need to know.


FURTHER THOUGHTS ON HOW THE UNFORTUNATE
JAN BREWER CAME TO BE GOVERNOR OF ARIZONA

The attention that has been focused on the Arizona governor's race thanks mostly to Governor Brewer's debate performance has belatedly set me to thinking more about how exactly she came to be governor. Which takes me back to the, um, curious way President-elect Obama went about filling the high-level positions in his administration. I think we should talk about that one of these days.

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