DEBATE OR CATTLE CALL

Something better than a cattle call of presidential candidates is needed for future “debates.”

Fox News did try to round up smaller numbers of would-be nominees by dividing the 17 hopefuls into groups of seven with low polling numbers and the ten with higher numbers. Still too many for such a format of moderators asking questions.

Many of the questions were designed to entrap the hopefuls into explaining spoken words or statements later construed by press and opponents as less than precise or even pernicious. Good entertainment, but not very helpful to voters who will need to decide how to use their franchise in primary and general elections. Real issues are complex and viewpoints or proposed solutions cannot be put forth properly in a minute.

In the two hours given to the questioning of the upper tier, some questions were missing, although the candidates managed to get in a few references. Government debt, taxation, regulation, foreign relations.

Then there was the grade school exercise that opened the prime-time session. Ten adults having resumes of accomplishment in government or the private sector (versus the celebrity of cablecasting) were asked to raise hands if they might try a third party or independent run for president if denied the Republican Party nomination. Besides the undignified nature of the request, it was designed to smoke out but a single suspect candidate, which worked. That candidate could have been asked directly as such a threat applied only to him, as did such questions asked others based on their own words or actions.

Questions and other talk by the moderators consumed nearly 32 percent of the allotted time in the prime-time session. They used 31 minutes, 53 seconds according to a University of Minnesota researcher whose data was reported on the Web. The candidate -- the target of the hand raising, as it happened -- with the most time speaking did so for 10 minutes 32 seconds. Next used 8:32, and the tenth got 5:10.

A record 24 million people watched, the most ever for a non-sports, cable news show.  No one knows how many of those viewers will watch future debates or who used the first show to make up their minds. And, of course, how their reactions might affect the final outcome in November 2016 is not worth considering. Nonetheless, such a large number can have some consequences, such as retention of the format, one which is not that informative.