Forever Playing Catch-Up.

The moderators for the presidential debates were announced last week by the Commission on Presidential Debates, and, surprise, surprise, the moderators are three aged white men:

Jim Lehrer, Tom Brokaw, and Bob Schieffer.

Gwen Ifill, who moderated the VP debate in ’04, has been tapped to moderate it again this year.

NPR’s Michel Martin took a few moments to discuss the absurdity myopia of the decision:

You cannot tell me that race and age do not matter in year where race and age are the two issues people bring up when they talk about how they’re going to vote and why. Think about it: if the commission had picked three 40-something African Americans to moderate all three debates, do you think somebody would say, ‘Gee, is that fair to John McCain?’

Of course, the CPD’s executive director Janet Brown said the moderators were picked based on their years of experience. Martin goes on to list several journalists who could fill that description, but who also happen to be women or people of color. While she doesn’t blame the commission for eschewing women or people of color because they’re women or people of color, she does make a good point:

I think they made the all too typical mistake of seeing white men as the universal citizen, the standard by which everybody else must be judged, without recognizing that they, too, have a perspective, a life history, a worldview.

This is what frustrates me: just as white women are the baseline for womanhood, white men are the baseline for humanity, and we’re all supposed to try our best to get on their level. Nevermind that Ifill kicked ass as the VP moderator four years ago, and, if anything, “proved” herself to be an impartial, firm, and thoughtful questioner. What more do they need? And the ‘they’ in question is a relatively diverse board, which is another reason why the choices are so perplexing.

How long will it be until women and/or people of color attain the requisite experience and gravitas to question the men and women applying to lead one the world’s most diverse nations? Will we forever be answering to white men, even as their population shrinks?