Ending the debate about presidential debates: pick winning formats and keep the candidates out of it

_{photos of Bush from 2004. This can't ever happen again.}

Every 4 years, we have a presidential cycle, and every quadrennial, we have a debate... about presidential debates.

This year, we have the "hey, let's have town meetings" and the "hey, let's have Lincoln-Douglas debates." And these are good ideas. But part of why we have this debate is that we never know what and how and when we have debates.

The days of the League of Women Voters running a non-partisan debate setup are long gone. And that is a shame. We need a non-partisan group to set up a system and say how we will have debates.

The debates shouldn't be set to the whims of the candidate who is running. We should establish a setup where we, the voters, think we will get the most from the candidates.

It felt like Al Gore and George W. Bush set the tone in 2000 and John Kerry and Bush set the tone in 2004, and it may have made them feel better, but didn't serve us and democracy well at all.

If you are running for president of the United States, you should know coming in that there will be 5 debates: 2 traditional, 1 town hall, 1 YouTube, and 1 other, perhaps a Lincoln-Douglas debate, with a VP debate. The moderators and panelists will not be selected or approved by the candidates, and they will be picked from a variety of media, with very few TV people involved. The networks can fight over which debates they carry, but at least one over-the-air network must carry each debate.

(This is, of course, one scenario, but I happen to like this one a lot.)

And there will be some ground rules for these debates. Some will be obvious. Penalty time will be assessed if you go over time or dance around a question.

Others should be obvious, but haven't been. For example, no electronic help will be allowed.

In a recent talk in Chicago, Newton Minow noted that the candidates used to be told that no notes could be brought into the studio, and that they were checked to see if they had any paper on them. Minow said that candidates were then given blue pieces of paper to take notes during the debate.

No candidate team will have any input on how the debates are staged. For example, from the 2004 debates: "Suspicious observers noted Bush's debate advance team had insisted that no cameras be positioned behind Bush or Kerry during the debate."

And finally, if a third-party candidate reaches a reasonable percentage in the polls, that person will be invited to the debate, regardless of how the Democratic Party or the Republican Party feels about the matter.

Those are some of what I would do to improve the presidential debates. And I would use those same rules for the primary debates. There is no way Charles Gibson should ever have any control or input into a debate ever again.

But let us know what you think: how would you set up the debates? Would you have it the same way each time? Would you have non-partisans run them? Leave it up to the candidates? Let us know.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

buzzflash | delicious | digg | yahoo | technorati