BATON ROUGE, LA. — A presidential campaign that has made historic strides in the areas of race, gender and fundraising could be poised to rewrite the book on debates.
With the bruising Democratic contest over, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain said Wednesday that he had proposed a series of town hall meetings with Barack Obama to be held across the country.
The first would be at New York's Federal Hall a week from today.
"I don't think we need any big media-run productions, no process questions from reporters, no spin rooms. Just two Americans running for the highest office in the greatest nation on Earth responding to the concerns of the people whose trust we must earn," McCain said during a town hall meeting here.
"Oh, we're definitely going to be doing some town hall debates," Obama said Wednesday on ABC's "World News." And while the face-offs will not start as soon as McCain suggested, the presumed Democratic nominee said, "I look forward to . . . having more than just the three traditional debates that we've seen in recent presidential contests."
In his letter to the Obama campaign, McCain suggested 10 town hall meetings, one per week, to be held before the Democratic National Convention at the end of August.
They would be 60 to 90 minutes apiece and have blind questions, an independent moderator and a live audience of 200 to 400 voters selected by a polling organization such as Gallup.
The timetable would make the debates the first between major-party candidates to occur before Labor Day weekend -- the traditional start of the fall campaign season.
They also would be the first between candidates who have yet to formally receive their parties' nominations.
Earlier, more frequent debates could help carry the high voter interest levels seen during the primary season into the summer, while providing a chance to hear the candidates delve deeply into specific issues, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
"The current structure [of campaigning] rewards candidates for being able to synthesize and digest. It doesn't reward candidates for speaking about complex issues in a nuanced fashion," Jamieson said.
The sessions could prove to be revolutionary innovations in campaigning, she said.
