Since I didn’t get to sound off on these issues on the radio, maybe I’ll just give vent here.
I watched all four of the so-called debates. Mostly they were pretty boring. I thought the last one was the most interesting, but all in all they were disappointing.
The debates frustrate me. Once upon a time they were run by a non-partisan group, the League of Women Voters. But for the last twenty-odd years they’ve been put on (and we’ve all been put on) by a bipartisan commission. The debates are controlled by the two major parties — two of the most powerful political entities in the world — and as one might expect, they are constructed to serve the interests of those parties.
And, face it, those parties are old and entrenched. Yet they’re both trying to sell a message of change. The mind boggles. But I digress.
What frustrates me in the debates is what frustrates me in our national political dialog: The scope is too narrow. The dialog is so tightly circumscribed that we have come to examine and contrast minute differences of policy between Democrats and Republicans, magnifying these differences so greatly that it’s easy to forget that there is a much wider range of possibilities.
To some extent this magnification is justified. The Presidency of the United States is perhaps the most powerful office in the world. I acknowledge that even the smallest differences can have huge effects on all of us.
But surely we are impoverished by not allowing a broader range of political dialog.