In need of a shower and pessimistic about the future of America.
It's not moderator Ken Verdoia's fault. The KUED host/documentarian started out with the "not in my house" best of intentions. As he outlined the rules for the two-hour "debate," a heckler called out from the audience.
"I know there's not a single person in this hall that paid to listen to you," Verdoia said, to the crowd's delight. "Do me one real big favor: Put a sock in it."
Verdoia did his best to keep the "debate" on point and on time. But in the end, he became one of the players - the jester - in the theater of the absurd that played out at Kingsbury Hall on Friday night.
I don't blame the moderator for becoming the comic relief. For that, I blame Hannity, Anderson and the right-tilted crowd who came to "listen." No doubt, someone somewhere will say Friday night's spectacle was debate in grand democratic tradition - raucous, free-wheeling and divisive.
Lincoln and Douglas it wasn't.
An attorney by training, Rocky showed up with a PowerPoint presentation and a sheaf of notes to make his case that President Bush should be impeached for the war in Iraq. Hamburger-faced Abu Ghraib detainees were juxtaposed with pictures of a flooded New Orleans. He evoked the Nuremberg trials and the Geneva Convention and added Bush's picture to those of Chile dictator Augusto Pinochet, Korea's Kim Jung Il and Saddam Hussein.
Stoic and scholarly, the mayor figured his evidence would make the case for him. In this forum, it couldn't.
A showman, Hannity came without evidence. Instead, he deflected the debate's central question about the president, resorting to emotion and the easy dig at Rocky - "Ross," as Hannity derisively called him - and any Democratic senator who voted for the war. To start, he trotted out the parents of Adam Galvez, the 21-year-old Utah Marine killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb last year. He claimed to have a picture of the mayor's car with a John Kerry bumper-sticker. Calling Rocky a "part-time mayor, full-time protestor," Hannity said he had looked at the mayor's calendar and figured he had been out of the office 74 days out of last year. And he effectively shut down the crowd by blaming any catcalls on "free speech-loving liberals."
The low point came when Hannity turned on skeptics in the audience, suggesting they will blame their hangovers and unplanned pregnancies tomorrow on the poor president. "If the dog bites, if the bee stings, if you're feeling sad, everything is George Bush's fault," Hannity said.
Both men claimed the production wasn't about them, wasn't about their overwhelming egos, their entrenched partisan views. Really, both said, they want to find middle ground and heal the nation. At the same time, Hannity plugged his show Monday, promising to play a clip of former President Clinton to prove the 9/11 attacks are really his fault, and told the mayor to "read my first book." Anderson kept returning to that PowerPoint and offered his own book recommendation, Lawrence Wright's Looming Tower.
Caught literally and figuratively in the middle, Verdoia directed both men stalking to the center of the stage á lÀ Al Gore 2000 back to their podiums. He attempted to keep time. And he tried to keep the audience to a low roar.
"The most hopeless person in all of this is me," Verdoia said.
He knew the potential pitfalls beforehand. "The greatest peril comes if either the audience or the participants decide to depart from simple, respectful process," Verdoia said. "If there's a place where this will fail, it's if these two people come out in robes and preach to their individual choirs."
In that case, it failed.
No minds were changed. Few points were made. In the end, the Republicans in the crowd crowed about their boy's smooth jabs and one-liners. The Democrats were deflated by their fighter's schoolmarm performance.
It was not discourse; it was discord. And we're right back where we started.
walsh@sltrib.com
