No Arguing the Discomfitures of Debating

Nightmarish things happen at debates all the time.

Things worse, even, than Al Gore using the impossibly obscure word “maximalist” the other night while he was attempting to come across as a regular guy.

Way worse than George W. getting his facts wrong on the sentencing of three men in a Texas hate crime.

I watched the presidential candidates’ second debate Wednesday with two coaches and three students from Moorpark College’s celebrated debate team.

They know their stuff. A well-honed argument at Moorpark College is what a well-thrown pass is at the University of Nebraska. In the past 28 years, Moorpark has won seven U.S. championships. In 23 of those years, it has placed in the top three nationally. Team members sometimes complete their education at four-year schools with the help of debate scholarships.

Being debaters, my companions were able to sink into the living-room couches and view the Gore-Bush matchup with compassion, understanding and the wisdom borne of hard experience.

That is, they pounced on every flub.

“Look at the laid-back way Bush is sitting,” said Rolland Petrello, a speech professor who serves as one of the team’s four coaches. “You have to find a position you can maintain the entire time. Otherwise, it’ll look like you’re squirming.”

Sure enough, under Gore’s attacks, Bush appeared to shift nervously, like a teenage boy trying to figure out how to put his arm around his date.

On the other hand, the group dinged Gore for not looking directly at Bush, but glancing at him sneaky-Pete style, from the corner of his eyes.

Then there was Gore’s ponderous pace and the unattractive way George W. scrunched up his lips. Neither man had a shred of charisma and neither could summarize his points to let everyone know just what it was he had been talking about all this while.

“Crystallize!” Petrello said with a coach’s urgency. “They’ve got to crystallize!”

Still, the two managed to avoid plunging into chasms of oratorical embarrassment--a feeling only debaters can fully appreciate.

“When I first got into this, I was absolutely terrified--more frightened than I’d ever been of anything,” said Karey Williams, a debater who was thrown into a state tournament just weeks after joining the team. “I’d have sooner jumped into the ring with a sumo wrestler.”

Unlike presidential candidates, who are drilled into insensibility on all the questions they’ll be asked, college debaters don’t know their topics until 15 minutes before they’re up. If they know nothing of moral relativism or nuclear power or Milli Vanilli, then they learn to poke holes in the opposition’s arguments.

“We look for hasty generalizations,” Williams said.

“Plus broad assumptions and internal inconsistencies,” added her debate partner, Vanessa Harikul, who earned a prize as the state’s top speaker.

But logic doesn’t keep terrible things from happening.

Like grizzled veterans, the debaters swapped war stories.

There was the college speech contest when a man reciting a poem broke out in a sudden, agonizingly obvious bout of incontinence.

“The amazing thing was he still beat my friend,” recalled Jill McCall, another Moorpark coach.

Then there were the tales of student orators emoting before the judges with their flies open, their blouses carelessly buttoned, their teeth festooned with dark gobs of vegetable matter.

Petrello revealed his worst moment in competition.

His team was going up against the Air Force Academy. He hated going up against the Air Force Academy. After eight hours of rhetoric, everyone else was rumpled and hoarse--but the cadets were always crisp and straight, like human exclamation points.

This day would be different, though. Sure and smooth, Petrello was ready to begin. As deliberately as Wyatt Earp strapping on a six-shooter, he closed his briefcase and started to remove it from the lectern.

“But I’d caught my tie in it,” he said. “And on top of that, it had locked shut.”

Suddenly the sin of “maximalist” seems pretty minimal.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.