Tembusu Forum: Mock US Presidential Elections

Hello again. I know I haven't been doing a good job updating this blog regularly, so here's my way of making up for that with a quick post (while my thoughts are still fresh!).

So we just had yet another Tembusu Forum. This Forum was a bit different from the usual, in that it was framed as an electoral debate. The idea of replicating the ongoing Presidential Debate was not only interesting, but quite fun too. It's only a pity that the content of the discussion did not live up to its potential.

Most of the debate was really quite petty. Half the arguments each panelist presented consisted mainly of blaming the other party for some fault or misdeed. By the end of the Forum I felt like I had watched two young boys quarrel over who's better. It's such a shame, because there were some really good questions posed, but both parties seemed to side-step requests for specific policies. It's probably unfair to assume what was presented was representative of the actual elections (which I've yet to catch); but there were a few things that can be learned from this 'debate'.

One, was that neither party had any substantial policy or strategy to offer. There's a sense of an underlying crisis, that both parties had run out of solutions, and their best argument was to forward how the opposing party was contributing to some failure or other. Secondly, the debate proves how useless it is to take such a competitive stance, especially since neither side were proposing any concrete solutions. It seems to turn the entire election into a sport, where the choice of which side to support boils down to arbitrary preferences.

In one of the panelist's questions, there was also an interesting point raised on how the Republicans had used typically Democratic policies, and vice versa, in certain situations. I wish that rather than taking the defensive, both parties had taken a more consensual and cooperative view on solution-finding. It's hard to believe that the two parties (or what was represented in the Forum) truly had the interests of their nation at heart, because none of their responses sought to be constructive. The Forum was basically reduced to a paltry argument between two brothers – both of whom miserably lost.