Brookings forum to get down to nitty-gritty

By Michael Mishak (contact)

Sunday, Nov. 11, 2007 | 8:01 a.m.

On the heels of this week's Democratic presidential debate at UNLV that's sure to be filled with "lightning rounds" and 30-second sound bites, a panel of national foreign policy experts and political analysts will tackle the real substance of the campaign.

The Brookings Institution, in partnership with ABC News, will host a three-hour forum Friday called "National Security at Home and Abroad." The forum, beginning at 9 a.m. in the UNLV Student Union Theatre, is part of Brookings' "Opportunity 08" project, a bipartisan effort aimed at getting the candidates and the public to focus on critical issues facing the country.

The Sun is co-sponsoring Friday's event. Sun Editor Brian Greenspun is a Brookings trustee.

The panel includes veterans of Democratic and Republican administrations:

Past forums have taken the debate outside the Washington beltway and injected it in the early-voting states. A forum in Iowa last month focused on energy policy and a panel in New Hampshire in September discussed the budget deficit and the cost of health care. In August, experts addressed foreign policy and education at two forums in Reno.

The Brookings Institution is a Washington-based think tank devoted to policy solutions on a wide variety of domestic and foreign issues.

The Brookings forum comes at a crucial time. With less than two months to go before the first votes are cast, polls show the public wants more policy discussion and less horse race coverage.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy have found that 63 percent of this year's election stories have focused on the political and tactical aspects of the campaign - nearly four times the number of stories about the personal backgrounds of the candidates or the candidates' ideas and policy proposals.

About 1 percent of stories examined the candidates' records or past public performance, the study found, and only 12 percent explained how citizens might be affected by the election. On the other hand, nearly nine out of 10 stories focused on matters that largely affected only the parties and the candidates.

The findings suggest the media are not giving readers what they want. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that about eight in 10 Americans say they want more coverage of the candidates' stances on issues.