There’s consensus among political experts that the location, moderator and audience at last week’s Democratic presidential debate, held at Howard University, forced candidates to discuss solutions to issues concerning Blacks and other minority voters. A second forum for candidates seeking the Republican presidential nomination will be broadcast by PBS in September from another historically Black campus, Morgan State University in Baltimore.
“Context shapes content,” says Georgetown University professor and author Dr. Michael Eric Dyson. “The audience made the candidates focus on questions they may not have been asked in the broader society.”
Inside Howard’s 1,500-seat Crampton Auditorium, the candidates faced an audience that lives and breathes in the country’s political backyard. Tickets to the event were equally divided among members of the Howard community, friends of host Tavis Smiley and PBS, and the candidates own supporters.
It was PBS talk show host and author Smiley’s idea to host the two “All-American Presidential Forums” – the first at Howard and second at Morgan State. Smiley said in a CSPAN interview that his biggest challenge was convincing PBS that the forums would be worthwhile. Smiley has said his goal was to “provide an unprecedented level of inclusion” in the discussion of issues affecting the country’s future.
“Tavis structured it so that it was linked to a set of issues in his work, the Covenant,” says Dr. Ronald Walters, director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland. The Covenant With Black America, a New York Times bestseller, identifies public policy issues important to African-Americans.
“There were no ‘gimme’ questions, like ‘What are you going to do with Bill Clinton,’” Walters says. “The questions focused on public policy.”
Massachusetts’ first minority governor, Deval Patrick, introduced the eight Democratic candidates” Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd, John Edwards, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson.
