New Orleans vs. Anytown, USA

Remember in the 2004 presidential debates when John Kerry kept promising to KILL--not “find” or even “defeat”--the terrorists? I certainly do; I had nightmares about the senator presenting my ballot as a credential before strangling some guy with his own two, war-hero hands.

How about this: Do you remember where Kerry and President Bush debated that fall? Miami, St. Louis, and Phoenix—but I couldn’t have told you that without looking it up. General-election debates just don’t tend to feature much of a sense of place; they function instead as what Scott Gabriel Knowles describes as “abstractly ‘representative’ American geographies.”

Check out this post of Knowles’ from last fall, in response to the news that the Commission on Presidential Debates plans to hold this fall’s debates in Oxford, Mississippi, Hempstead, New York, and Nashville. He argues that Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New Orleans would have been better choices:

California has lost more of its citizens to the Iraq War and aftermath than any state, and L.A. as it’s largest metro region might make the perfect place to see the face of the war’s toll on U.S. soldiers and their families. Philadelphia suffers from the highest murder rate in the country, and would be the ideal location to talk about gangs, drugs, guns, post-industrial urban economics, and the failures of public education. New Orleans brings it all together, the ideal urban host to a conversation that would include questions about environmental degradation, energy independence, global warming, poverty, race, crime, and of course disaster and emergency preparedness, with a full airing of the Katrina saga.

Perhaps the commission will take this to heart when planning locations for 2012. Then, in 2016, we can turn our attention to trying to make the debates themselves something more than a who’s-tougher-on-terror charade.