Here We Go Again …

Last night’s debate was a real shame. Prime-time. Big audience. A lot at stake. And ABC decides to take us to commercials before the candidates even get to smile?! What were they thinking? And the questions were demeaning, not just to the candidates, but to the voters.

Why must we parse the off-the-cuff remarks and misstatements and go over and over irrelevant relationships that have nothing to do with the candidates’ qualifications, values or stands on the issues? Beats me. When so much is at stake for so many Americans, when they are more engaged and concerned about this election that they have been in decades, when they are faced with an economy which is taking them down and a war that seems to know no end, ABC is spending time on more games of “gotcha.”

My fervent hope is that voters will rebel against this politics from the “Beltway bubble” and begin to actually boo these kinds of questions. All you have to do is read the news accounts today to find that paragraph after paragraph rehashes the petty attacks; and we are lucky to get a half-dozen paragraphs on issues that people really care about.

This has happened before in previous debates, and all we can hope for as we move toward November is that the questions will be important to voters, not to those of us who pontificate endlessly on every silly sound bite. Let’s talk about what matters. This election is too important to treat as a schoolyard brawl.