There is no void of opinion concerning the recent Republican & Democratic debates out there. Here is mine. I have to zero in on one specific bone of contention and that is the repeated line that the reason the debates suck is because it is “too early”. I take the complete opposite view.

We are deciding who will be the leader of the free world. The person in command of a nuclear arsenal, the person who will bring us into and out of war. We might want to spend more then a few weeks figuring out who that person will be. Having a long lead-up gives us all a chance to learn a thing or two about who is running. Having debates early gives us a chance to put them under scrutiny so we can be better informed about our decision.

The problem with the debates isn’t that they were early. Debates in theory give candidates the opportunity to express their views and let us in on who they are and how they think. They are one of the measures we use to pick a candidate but more importantly they are one of the tools we use to toss candidates out. The “debates” we had the last two weeks didn’t do any of that and its because there were too many people in them and not enough time to hear the ones who mattered.

Why are we wasting time during these debates looking over candidates we know there is no way, as long as sensibility, civility & good old fashion reason prevail, that we will actually elect to the position?

The debates suck because each of them has too many candidates standing up there. Candidates who distract from the issues, take time away from us getting invested in the actual candidates and who are there to basically get book deals and get their names in the papers or, more nobily, further one specific idea they have that most people already rejected.

This is how a debate watcher views such “candidates”:

“You want us out of Iraq in the next ten minutes but have no plan for how to deal with the mess it will create? Wonderful, we heard the idea. We rejected it overwhelmingly, now what? Oh there is an hour and a half left? Splendid. Do you have an immigration policy or fiscal plan we overwhelmingly rejected as well? Do tell!”

Not everyone gets to be president. This isn’t kindergarten & we aren’t playing duck-duck-goose. There doesn’t need to be equality. If you want to make the debates more interesting you need to weed out the people we have no intention of voting for. I will give you four names. Kucinich, Gravel, Paul & Tancredo. All perfectly nice people as far as I can tell, all of whom will never be president. MSNBC, FOX NEWS, PBS, CNN & all the rest are just wasting our time by putting them there.

It doesn’t matter how much media exposure they get either. They can be on CNN twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week until November 2008. Not gonna happen. It doesn’t matter how many MySpace friends they get or how many hits their Web pages see. Mike Gravel will not be sitting at the head chair in the White House situation room and Ron Paul will not have a shot to abolish the IRS & destroy all American alliances.

So why do we need to pretend like they actually have a shot? Occasionally someone might surprise you. Howard Dean is a good example. Nobody thought he would get the nomination but for ten seconds there it looked possible. (Then he ended up not getting the nomination. See we were right!) I think what we need is a major & minor league of campaigning.

You have your serious candidates. The ones people actually support through money, effort, polling results & who they share idealogies with. Then there is everyone else. Major league, minor league. Do you have a fair & balanced health care plan backed by medical doctors, some corporate lobbyists & people know your name when pollsters call? Sounds like a major leaguer. Did you make a racist joke on the way to a VFW meeting and then demanded the FDA be abolished because you swear dentists are putting tracking devices in your molars? Probably should go to the minor league debate.

Now we have a bunch of debates ahead of us, I think we could spare a few for the minor leagues. This way if one of them shows promise and actually can raise more than a thousand dollars they might have a shot of moving up with the other candidates.

Mitt Romney is a great example. Guy looks like he has no shot at being president. Has a bad name that my fiance still says “His name is Mitt? Like a Glove? Really”, has an ever changing view of the world, has little shot. But he raised a boatload of money. Still polling not so great but is polling at more then 10%. He is in the major leagues. Dennis Kucinich on the other hand, wow, not a chance in hell.

Putting ten people on a stage and giving them fifteen seconds to talk isn’t a debate. It is a masters degree course in wasting peoples time. But more then that it is a twelve credit course which counts for your thesis and is dual credit toward a PhD, which is to say PLEASE STOP TORTURING US.

It isn’t at all an affront to democracy to concede that Mike Gravel isn’t going to be president. Nothing in the constitution guarantees someone that the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t agree with, don’t support, won’t give money too and don’t know even after they have been introduced fifteen times, needs to be given an equal chance to be president.

The debates suck not because of the medium but because of the message. Lets end the misery and change the content, then we will all be happy.