In the debate Tuesday night between Vice President Al Gore and Ross Perot, the public was treated to a spectacle that was more entertaining than edifying.
It's not that their televised confrontation was uninformative, but the conflicting charts, graphs and figures shown by Gore and Perot tended to get lost among the verbal clawing and scratching.That's not entirely the fault of the two antagonists since the forum and format of the Gore-Perot debate amounted to the misuse of an otherwise valuable tool.
TV debates can help voters make up their minds between competing political candidates by sizing up their respective personalities and characters. But television in general and the talk show format in particular, with its built-in emphasis on sound bites and zingers, is much less effective when it comes to helping the public sort through complicated ideas, particularly those involving some fairly sophisticated economics.
Consequently, much of Tuesday night's performance on CNN's Larry King show offered the public more a choice of style than of substance - of Perot's feisty but testy folksiness vs. Gore's earnest but staid polish.
But then such flaws likely are not crucial. Even on a good night, King's audience amounts to only about 1 per cent of the nation's TV viewing households.
Besides, the fate of NAFTA rests not with the TV-viewing public but with Congress, whose members ought to know far more about the pros and cons of the trade pact among the United States, Canada and Mexico than they could have learned from Tuesday night's debate.
A Gallup-CNN poll taken immediately after the debate scored Gore the winner, with 59 per cent of the viewers saying he won while 32 per cent thought Perot came out on top.
As for those still undecided following the Gore-Perot confrontation, there's a relatively easy way to make up their minds: Look at how the supporters and opponents line up.
NAFTA was crafted by the Bush administration, fine-tuned by the Clinton administration, and is endorsed by every living ex-president and every living winner of the Nobel prize for economics.
The opponents, by contrast, are mainly union leaders and Ross Perot, who finished third in the 1992 presidential election and whose favorable rating in the public opinion polls has slipped - from 66 per cent in March to 44 per cent last week - as his attacks on NAFTA have escalated.
Those facts, as much as anything said on the tube Tuesday night, should make the public's decision on NAFTA easy.