Thursday, October 29, 2015

How would I fix the Presidential debate format?

Glad you asked.

I think we can safely say, that after three debates amongst the Republican contenders for President, that the debate format is f*cked. Also, the RNC, after watching impotently during the 2012 primaries as the candidates to save this country from Obama and the Dems disastrous policies went up in flames as left-biased moderators turned the field into a bunch of easily mockable clowns, has learned nothing.

Last night's debate was the lowest of the three and all were pretty crappy in my opinion. Even the FOX debate was little more than "Donald Trump says this . . . how do you respond?"

So here's my solution:

One day -- five debates / one topic. Let's say . . . the economy, as last night's debate was supposed to be about.

We've got 10 fairly realistic contenders (listed basically in top down order by poll numbers):

Donald Trump
Dr. Ben Carson
Sen. Marco Rubio
Sen. Ted Cruz
Carly Fiorina
Jeb Bush
Chris Christie
Mike Huckabee
Sen. Rand Paul
John Kasich

Now we split the field in half -- the top five and the bottom five. Now using a little randomizing program I've developed (seriously, I did, and it works rather nicely), we reorder the candidates and pair them off thusly:

Trump & Huckabee
Cruz & Kasich
Rubio & Paul
Carson & Bush
Fiorina & Christie

Now you sit each pair down at a table with a moderator, someone uncombative like Brit Hume for example, and you ask them 12 questions. Give each candidate 2 minutes to respond with a 30 second rebuttal. That's about an hour for each pair. And each pair gets asked the exact same 12 questions.

You can post the full five debates on the RNC website and allow various news outlets to take what they want for their shows. FOX and MSNBC and CNN and the alphabet networks can all compare and contrast the answers according to their own programming decisions. And voters would have access to the unedited debates to answer any fears they might have about bias in the various networks.

And have separate debates on single issues -- economy, national defense, education, immigration, etc.

Easy. Right? Get the answers out there. No grandstanding or ad hominem attacks. Just pure substantive info on policy and the direction the candidates want to take the country.

And as the field winnows down, you can expand the time (answer time limits or number of questions or both) to get more in depth with the remaining candidates.

This is so simple.

How 'bout it Reince?



Okay, fine . . . here's Holly Peers in see-thru mesh:

holly peers obsessive lingerie

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not sure what part of this post I like the best :)

postaldog said...

Maybe if I had suggested Ms. Peers as a moderator for the debates?