Dulling Down the Debates
It seems like everyone wants to mediocrify what should be the most momentous election season in several years.
PROGRAM ADVISORY: We look at the three leading candidates for District 3 Supervisor over at The Voice. Check it out
This week’s mayoral debate, held Wednesday at the Sydney Goldstein Theater and organized by Manny’s and City Arts and Lectures, exemplifies how this year’s election season, which has significant consequences, seems to be getting off to a rather dull start. It’s as if everyone wants it to be boring when it shouldn’t be.
The event featured incumbent Mayor London Breed, leading challenger and former Interim Mayor Mark Farrell, philanthropist Daniel Lurie, Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin, and some other person. Highlights were few and far between and have been noted by the dailies [tellingly, Josh Koehn at the Standard could only spot five fun takeaways, while Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez captured the essence of things]. There were, however, some telling lowlights.
Paid Access? Really?
More than a few people I talked to grumbled about admission being charged to the event, even for a “virtual ticket” to watch a stream on YouTube. Especially given the poor production quality of the event. The stream was riddled with glitches, leading to candidates being cut off.
Dr. Who Production Values
The whole thing was oddly slap-dash, and the sound was terrible. New York Times SF Bureau Chief Heather Knight gamely played moderator and quizmaster while would-be civic impresario Manny Yekutiel seemed to be emceeing a wholly different event. Candidates were given TED-talk/Kate Bush/Madonna-style active headsets but allowed to hide behind podiums.
At least one badly-hatched debate rule had to be amended by Knight mid-stream: candidates could offer rebuttals if their records were criticized, but only if their name was explicitly mentioned. Breed fell foul of this rule when she wanted to respond to sideways remarks but was blocked by Yekutiel, leading to boos from the audience. Knight modified the rule on the fly, allowing Peskin to react to some “side-eye” put his way.
The whole thing had an unfortunate Lex Fridman air to it. That’s not a compliment.
PeskinPrompter
We’re not sure if it was the lighting or if he was still recovering from COVID, but Peskin could not look up from his podium for most of the debate and appeared to be reading prepared material for his answers. This elicited considerable snark in the online chat:
Peskin also had the most apparent shills in the chat:
It’s certainly possible that Peskin was phoning it in, assuming that the City Arts & Lectures venue would mainly attract an audience of highly active self-aware hothouse flowers, whose first goal of the week would typically be to chalk up yet another search result for themselves at DrewAltizer.com. It’s a shame Austin Hills, the instant coffee scion who pulled papers earlier in the year, didn’t file after all; he could’ve joined in the socialite side-eye subtext Farrell and Lurie were engaging in.
Even the Gate Crashers were Boring
Activists protesting Breed’s planned budget cuts disrupted the proceedings more than halfway through. The audience started rumbling, and Breed asked, “Are you guys sure you wanta do this?” Then, somebody in the audience yelled at the protestors to STFU. Then they were gone (anyone interested in finding them should head to City Hall next week, where they will all be camped out in one of the second-floor conference rooms for the budget add-back talks, complete with catered lunch).
It was far from the cage-rattling you would see in former years. During the 1999 mayoral election, one with similar stakes as Willie Brown fended off Clint Reilly and a cast of thousands, one large debate at the Mission High School auditorium was shut down by outlaw candidate Lucrecia Bermudez and supporters. As sheriff’s deputies moved in to frogmarch Bermudez and her compatriots out of the house, one of her supporters used a small child as a human shield.
Last month, we had the polite progressive showcase held by the Milk Club, which stole this event’s thunder in revealing any new insights into the contenders despite it not being an actual debate. Next week is the Democratic Party's debate at UC Law, which should be considerably more interesting, but space is limited—as in, already sold out.
It’s almost as if any honest dialogue between the candidates is being deliberately diluted as events are split up among narrowcast cohorts.