Charlie Brown, meet the Republican Party
Remember in the Peanuts comic strips when, every fall, Lucy promised “wishy-washy” Charlie Brown that she wouldn’t lift the football away when he tried to kick it? And year-after-year the hapless “blockhead” gullibly falls for the girl’s prank.
This scene is eerily reminiscent of the 2012 presidential debates. When are naive Republicans going to wake up and realize that their opponent doesn’t play fair. The Democratic party continues to follow the rules of the Saul Alinsky playbook as in: “Say or do whatever is necessary to win.” As an example, consider CNN’s Candy Crowley.
Vowing to be equally fair to both candidates after being selected as moderator, she later boasted about how she interrupted Mitt Romney at a critical moment in the debate when the sensitive subject of Benghazi was brought up by the challenger. If Mr. Romney hadn’t been derailed by the liberal moderator he might have destroyed Mr. Obama’s chances right then and there. Nobody knows for sure if this would have changed the outcome of the election, but everyone agrees that Crowley’s unethical interference was a critical blow to Romney’s momentum in the final days of the presidential campaign.
The lesson Republicans had better learn is that in future debates fairness is not negotiable. The moderators and locations for the 2012 debates were assigned by the Commission on Presidential Debates, a mostly liberal collection of Washington insiders chosen by Congress, which explains the partisan bias of the selections.
I propose the following changes to the election debate format. Instead of a single moderator, two (or in the case of a third candidate, three) should be selected for each event. Each moderator would be chosen by one of the political parties for every debate and each party could select an equal share of debate venues. During the debate, in a rotation, each moderator would ask one question of the opposing party’s candidate.
After posing the question, the moderator starts a timer and when the allotted time for the answer is over, the speaker’s microphone is automatically switched off. While one candidate is speaking, all the other microphones (the moderators’ included) are switched off. This would prevent candidates interrupting or talking over a speaker or otherwise gaining an unfair time advantage over an opponent. This format would also end the tradition of lobbing softball questions to favored candidates and result in more vigorous, meaningful discussion of important national issues.
The questions would continue back and forth this way until the conclusion wherein each moderator could direct one question to their own party’s candidate.
If Democrats argue that this format is less fair than the current one, then Republicans should demand that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh (or comparable conservatives) be debate moderators in the next presidential debate in 2016 and refuse to accept anything less.
John Merlette is a resident of Bigfork.