Hey, Lucas Kunce and Josh Hawley: Spare us the alpha-male act and just debate | Opinion
Boys, boys. Settle down.
Sen. Josh Hawley and his challenger, Lucas Kunce, faced off at the Missouri State Fair Thursday morning.
But they weren’t debating. Instead, they were debating about maybe having a debate, sooner or later, sometime before the November election that will decide which one of them gets to represent Missouri in Washington next year.
Just not now. When they were literally inches from each other — so close that two men each took the opportunity to pat each other’s shoulders.
“Can you say yes to Fox News?” Kunce asked, referencing his proposal to debate Hawley on the conservative network.
Hawley, meanwhile, wanted to debate Kunce at the fair. (Fair officials, for their part, wanted no part of that.)
“Let’s debate! Let’s debate!” Hawley said to Kunce, then looked around at the surrounding media: “Unbelievable.”
It was honestly very silly.
And it was very reminiscent of the old joke they tell about the almost-fights you see regularly in the NBA and other sports. Players don’t want to be seen backing down from a physical challenge — but they’re also not that interested in actually taking a punch or getting suspended.
So what do they do? They perform tough guy-ness for the crowd and act like they’re charging into the fray, the whole time yelling “Hold me back! Hold me back!” to their teammates.
That’s been the Kunce-Hawley dynamic in the two weeks since they each won their primary elections — both men taking to social media to challenge each other to debate, both men accusing each other of ducking a debate, and somehow never getting around the actual debate part.
It’s almost like neither one wants to take the punch.
More performance than Lincoln-Douglas
Let me back up right here and say: I’m not sure I actually find political debates all that useful.
We don’t live in the Lincoln-Douglas era where candidates could exchange and articulate ideas over the course of a couple of hours. The news that comes out of most debates — especially presidential debates — usually has less to do with policy or insight into how a candidate would govern and more to do with how one or the other candidate performed.
Think George H.W. Bush looking impatiently at his watch during a debate with Bill Clinton. Or Al Gore using the word “lockbox” too often in 2000. Or Donald Trump’s conduct in the first 2020 debate against Joe Biden, an effort so obnoxious it reduced CNN anchors to terms unsuitable for a family newspaper.
Those are the most memorable debate moments from the last 30 years.
A debate did knock Biden out of this year’s presidential campaign — but again, that’s because he performed so badly on stage that Democrats felt they had no other choice but to push him out.
With Hawley and Kunce, we’re not even getting the performance. We’re getting a performance about the performance.
If they really wanted to debate, one imagines, their campaigns could quickly agree on a couple of dates and show up.
So far, that hasn’t happened.
Missourians aren’t very well served by all the posturing. There are important issues at stake. Hawley is facing the electorate for the first time since his Jan. 6 fist-bump moment. Kunce is running a high-dollar campaign that might offer Democrats the opportunity to challenge the GOP’s stranglehold on statewide and federal offices in the Show-Me State.
It could be interesting. It is important. Instead, we get this.
At debates, candidates at least have to talk about issues A debate about the debate — like the one that Kunce and Hawley had on Thursday — didn’t even go that far. Instead, the Senate opponents reduced politics to its very essence in the Donald Trump era: the performance of alpha-male puffery.
I’ll let others judge who won. It sure wasn’t Missouri voters.
Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.
This story was originally published August 15, 2024 at 10:59 AM.