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The widespread media enthusiasm that greeted President Obamaâs televised Q&A last Friday with Republican congressmen now has an official outlet. On Wednesday, an open letter signed by an ideologically diverse selection of worthies from the journalism and media worlds, and hailing the exchange as âone of the best national political debates in many years,â was published at DemandQuestionTime.com. The letterâwhich concluded, âIt is time to make Question Time a regular feature of our democracyâ âis linked to a petition that allows readers to register their support. By Thursday morning, nearly 7,500 had done so.
Though the letter is not explicit on this point, supporters of the effort seem to have a clear model in mind. As noted by David Corn, one of the campaignâs organizers, the phrase âquestion timeâ refers to the practice in the Westminster system in which members of parliament are allowed to ask questions of government ministers. (In its best-known incarnation, when the British Prime Minister is at the microphone, the event is referred to as the âPrime Ministerâs questions.â) Calls to institute the practice hereâwhich, given the White House’s tepid response, likely aren’t going anywhereâseem to rest on two assumptions: first, that question time is good for journalism, and good for government, in the places it is practiced; second, that it could be transplanted effectively from a parliamentary to a presidential system. Those assumptions may be well-founded, but letâs subject them to some scrutiny.
On the first scoreâis question time all itâs cracked up to be?âPatrick Hennessy, political editor of the London-based Sunday Telegraph, is a believer. âI do think itâs a good piece of democracy in action,â he said in an interview Wednesday afternoon. âIt can be irksome for the incumbent,â he said, but that is in part because it is âa great way of holding them to account very publicly.â Because it is shortâthirty minutes, once a weekâand accessible, it trains the attention of politicians, reporters, and the politically-minded public on a single event. âItâs the focus of the political week,â he said.
What do journalists get out of it? British politicians sometimes use the guaranteed audience to break news, Hennessy said. And even when they donât, thereâs plenty of drama for reporters to cover. His description of the event was replete with fighting metaphors: âthe House of Commons is a great gladiatorial arenaâ; the Prime Minister, engaging in âcut and thrust,â tries to âturn defense into attack.â This is not the sort of thing that necessarily warms the hearts of good-government types; nor is the fact that, as Hennessy acknowledged, preparing for the battle consumes âa massive amount of time.â Still, he said, putting the nationâs leaders through this ordeal âdoes provide a sort of civic benefit.â
Hennessyâs description of the event was largely echoed by Martin Kettle, a columnist at the Guardian, who described the Prime Ministerâs questions as âa ritual political bloodsport.â Their assessment of its merits, though, was sharply at odds. In Kettleâs view, the practice exacerbates the British systemâs inherently adversarial structureâand thatâs not a good thing. As class becomes less salient to British politics, and pressure grows for more consensus-building in government, âthereâs great [public] dissatisfaction with the constant creation of somewhat artificial dividing lines between the parties,â he said. Question time, if anything, reinforces the old divide. A talented politician like Tony Blair, who was an acknowledged master of the forum, may overcome that tension. But if the goal is, as Wednesdayâs open letter put it, political debate that is âeducational⌠substantive, civil and candid,â Kettle said, then âPrime Ministerâs question time should not be the model.â
Further, he said, itâs important âto be clear what PMQs is not. It is not forensic. It is not a fact-finding exercise.â (In this he distinguished it from question time with lower-ranking ministers, which is much less adversarial and can be âquite informative.â) And while Hennessy says he couldnât imagine the British system without question time, Kettle said he does not âthink many people would say Britain has better government because of the way that the Prime Ministerâs questions operatesââor, for that matter, that Britain has much to brag about at all in terms of government accountability. In fact, while America cribs ideas from the U.K., Kettle, who spent four years as the Guardianâs bureau chief in Washington, now looks back longingly at the oversight authority that can be wielded by congressional committees in the U.S.
That pointâabout the means for debate, oversight, and engagement that we already have at our disposalâgoes to the second issue: whether it makes sense to develop a âquestion timeâ equivalent in the U.S. As the political scientist and blogger Jon Bernstein wrote this week, the value of question time in Britain is that the parliamentary system affords very few other tools to the minority party, or even back-benchers of the majority party, to influence political decision-making. As the health care debate has shown, that is not a problem for the U.S. As Bernstein notes, âin Congress, the minority has real opportunitiesââand, along with it, a real responsibilityâto help make policy. What we need, he writes, is not question time but more presidential press conferences (which have been âsadly neglectedâ by Obama) and more press attention to meaningful Congressional hearings.
Structure and institutions matter a tremendous amount in politics; more, in fact, than the press is often willing to recognize. But in this case, the eagerness to adopt a foreign institution may be a way to avoid recognizing that the tools for a better politics are in our hands, if only we would choose to use them. âIt all goes to show,â Kettle said, âthat the grass always seems greener in the other guy’s garden, I suppose.â
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