Why the debates don't fucking matter.

Wake up.

The Obama and McCain campaigns jointly negotiated a detailed secret contract dictating the terms of all the 2008 debates. This includes who gets to participate, as well as the topics raised during the debates.

Wake up.

We used to have a fantastic, genuinely nonpartisan presidential debate sponsor: the League of Women Voters. From 1976 until 1984, the League of Women Voters hosted our most important public forums, and they made sure the debates served the public interest rather than the interest of any political party. And they had the guts to stand up to the two major parties. 

In 1980, former Republican Congressman John Anderson ran as an Independent for the president of the United States. President Jimmy Carter adamantly refused to debate him, but the League said, "Too bad.” And they hosted a presidential debate between Ronald Reagan and John Anderson that was watched by over 40 million people. 

The Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan campaigns actually vetoed sixty-eight of the moderators that the League of Women Voters had proposed for the three debates. In response, The League issued a scathing public press release castigating the candidates for abusing the process, and the Reagan and Mondale campaigns were forced to accept aggressive moderators.

Again, four years later, the League of Women Voters were refusing to implement any contract that was negotiated by the George Bush and Dukakis campaigns. They had negotiated the first secret contract, a twelve-page memoranda of understanding, that dictated who would participate and how the format would be structured. The League said, “This is an outrage!” 

Well, guess what? The parties did not like the fact that an uppity women’s organization, pro-democracy, was telling their boys who could participate in their debates and under what condition. And so, in 1987, they created this private corporation called the Commission on Presidential Debates. It sounds like a government agency; IT'S NOT. And every four years, it awards absolute control to the Republican and Democratic parties over our political forums. 

Wake up.

Much of the money that finances the presidential debates that are hosted by the Commission on Presidential Debates are private corporations that have regulatory interests before Congress. Anheuser-Busch has spent the most money of any company in the United States on presidential debates, which is partly why every four years we get a debate in St. Louis, and we don’t have a debate this year in New Orleans, which is dying for a debate, and massive civic groups were demanding that a debate be held there to highlight some of Katrina’s problems. 

Wake up.

You know, we're supposed to have limitations in this country. Corporations can’t give direct contributions to the candidates. Well, the Commission provides an end-run around. When a corporation gives money to the Commission on Presidential Debates, it knows it is giving money to both the Republican and Democratic parties, supporting their duopoly over our political process and excluding third party voices that may be hostile to corporate power. And all four third party candidates that are on ballots this year are sharply critical of growing corporate power. Yet, not one was included in these debates despite massive campaigns to open up the debates (http://opendebates.com/).

Wake up.

There is no doubt that often the Republican and Democratic parties take positions, in large part due to the corporate interests that finance their campaigns, that are directly at odds with the opinions of either the majority of Americans or tens of millions of Americans. And these debates, which are designed to inform voters so they can make substantive decisions, should be airing the ideas that are supported by the vast majority of Americans that the two major parties are excluding. 

And historically, that is the role that third parties have played. Historically, it has been third parties, not the major parties, that have supported and are responsible for the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, public schools, public power, unemployment compensation, minimum wage, child labor laws. The list goes on and on. The two parties fail to address a particular issue; a third party rises up, and it’s supported by tens of millions of Americans, forcing the Republican and Democratic parties to co-opt that issue, or the third party rises and succeeds, which is why the Republican Party jumped from being a third party to being a major party of the United States of America. 

When you exclude third parties from the election process, third parties that the vast majority of Americans would like to see in the presidential debates, you’re not only denying those people the right to choose who they want to run for president and who they want to vote for, but you’re denying the very fundamental and critical issues that, in a generative democracy, we need to have aired in from of tens of millions of voters. 

Until this happens, the debates don't fucking matter. Until this happens, our entire political process, what we so proudly call a 'democracy' is null and void. 

Wake up.