An Evening of Hot Air

Trey Smith

All the mainstream media hype is focused on the fact that tonight will be the first Presidential Debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Supposedly, undecided voters will get a better idea of which schmuck to vote for and, if debate #1 doesn't do the trick, they will have two more debate opportunities to help them make up their minds.

If you're one of those folks who feels that you must vote AND you still are unsure of whom to vote for, I think you shouldn't be allowed to vote...this year or EVER.

Presidential debates these days serve no substantive purpose other than time-honored pomp and circumstance. Since we now live in the 24/7 digital age, it's easy to find out where the mainstream candidates stand on any issue. Their speeches are released BEFORE they give them. Any new policy initiative is leaked days or weeks before it is announced. Almost every campaign-related event or occurrence is filmed and/or recorded. There are few secrets or surprises anymore.

It wasn't this way in the olden days. Before the inventions of the telegraph, telephone, radio, television and the internet, most voters knew very little about the main candidates. Debates allowed voters the opportunity to see where the candidates stood on the issues and how they handled themselves in an adversarial setting. Often, debates were the singular events when voters made up their minds of which candidate would receive their vote.

This is still true for lower races (e.g., city, county, school board, special district, etc.) in non-urban areas. In more rural locales, voters often know next to nothing about the names that will appear on the ballot. Debates allow voters to put a face to a name.

But on the national stage, the debates -- as they are currently formatted -- do little more than go through the motions. Even if you have only been paying half-attention to all the political hoopla of campaign season, chances are slim that you will learn ANYTHING new.

In my opinion, the ONLY thing that could make the presidential debates meaningful again is IF they allowed the chief non-mainstream candidates -- Gov. Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party), Dr. Jill Stein (Green Party) and Rocky Anderson (Justice Party) -- to participate alongside Romney and Obama. Since most voters know little, if anything, about Johnson, Stein and Anderson, we would have three debates in which people learned something new!

Not only would prospective voters learn a thing or two, but Obama and Romney would have to defend their positions in light of perspectives that, in some cases, are diametrically opposed to their own. Heck, there would actually be a real debate, not a feigned one!