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Hillary Clinton's repeated calls for more debates with Barack Obama after the Pennsylvania primary haven't been having much of an effect. No public outcry demanding another face-off by the two Democratic candidates. No media frenzy around the idea of another Hilllary vs Obama encounter.
So Clinton yesterday upped the ante by challenging Obama to a Lincoln-Douglas style debate. It worked. The media took the bait and dutifully reported about the proposed duell. After all, who knew at the time that the Lincoln-Douglas debates would become an oratorical landmark? Who knows, if Clinton and Obama debated under the Lincoln-Douglas rules maybe it would transform the event from slugfest to rhetorical masterpiece.
But it wouldn't. While Clinton challenged Obama to a Lincoln-Douglas debate, she didn't really mean it. First, there was not one Lincoln-Douglas debate, but a series of seven debates. Second, each debate lasted three hours and had a set format. The first candidate would start speaking for one hour, followed by the second candidate who had an hour and half after which the first candidate closed the event with a thirty minute rebuttal. Third, in today's media world no one but C-SPAN would broadcast an event lasting three hours where the shortest answer lasts a half hour. Today, we wouldn't consider the Lincoln-Douglas debates as debates. Instead, we would call them three very long speeches by two candidates with the possibility to react to what the opponent said.
Even if Lincoln and Douglas were around today, they would find it hard to reach an audience if they stuck to the format. For the Democratic presidential candidates, it would be impossible.
Hillary Clinton knows this. As all trailing candidates do, she simply wants another chance to square off against Obama. That's why she conveniently interprets a Lincoln-Douglas style debate as simply having a debate without a moderator, when it actually entails a lot more than that. But that wasn't Clinton's point. She wanted to increase the pressure on Obama to agree to another debate and she achieved it by throwing Lincoln and Douglas in the mix.
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