The Not-So-Great Debate

You know, I don't watch debates. They are not debates in any real sense of the word. They're more like sales meetings. Candidates appear and try to look like they might be good elected officials, but they seldom answer a question straight, let alone actually debate something. It's so frustrating that I've just given up, in the same way that I've given up on trying to devine the state of the union from the State Of The Union address.

From what I'm reading though, ABC managed to find a way around my objections with Wednesday's Democratic debate. Knowing they wouldn't get substantial answers about policy questions, they simply refused to go near those kinds of topics. They avoided any topic with substance apparently. Obama got hit with a lot of questions about people he knows who aren't running for President, Hillary was asked why she kept lying so much all the time. You could boil the first 40 minutes of the debate down to variations of "You're a really bad person, aren't you?"

And the answers were variations of "No I'm not, but my opponent might be."

Eventually they settled into the usual "what would you do if..." with the usual response of "I won't exactly say, but the Republican candidate eats babies."

Listen, you won't learn ANYthing from debates except that all politics sucks. Don't bother. The ultimate goal is for you to like one of the candidates more than the other, and you can get that from sound bites. I mean in the last two elections we (probably) chose the most likeable guy running and look where it got us!

If you insist on watching a staged, prescripted, disingenuous event with voting, may I suggest AMERICAN IDOL instead?