Too late for the debate?

In a couple of hours, we go through it all again. But I'm wondering...do these things really serve a purpose?

Yes, it's that time again.

Tonight Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will make one last play for your votes. Especially if you're undecided. The problem with that is that there are fewer and fewer undecided voters at this point, so what they really need to do is to persuade some voters from the other guy's camp to cross over into theirs.

Good luck with that, guys.

Here's the deal; Romney needed to win the first debate to salvage his failing campaign, and did. Obama needed to win the second debate to stop the fallout from Romney's victory, and did. They both need to win this one, for those very reasons. Nothing has really changed. And here I sit, trying to give you (all twenty or so of you) some idea of what's going to happen. Sorry, I don't have a clue.

 But here's a question that's been nagging away at me...do these debate things serve any real purpose?

Think about it. These debates are designed to show quick thinking, fast reactions and the ability to perform instantly under pressure. Which is all well and good, except that the Presidency seldom requires those skills.

Tonight each candidate will be out there unsupported and without notes, without reference material, relying on their own snap judgement and their memories to provide correct answers. When the hell does a President ever do that?

In the real world, Presidents have a lot of support. They are advised by their cabinet and various advisors on diverse topics, and they have speechwriters and image consultants and make-up people to make them look good doing it. They never make an important decision without consulting a small mountain of research material (well, the good ones don't; some of them use their staff to sort through all of that stuff). No president really needs to be lightening-quick, nor as omnipresently aware as we seem to want our leaders to be.

And yet that's what a debate (at least what serves for debate in modern politics) seem to test for, seems to require of a candidate; skills that the President doesn't actually use all that much. I ask again, to what purpose?

And it's no good to say that these things help us to "get to know" the candidates. That's precisely what they don't do! Case in point: Mitt Romney. For the first debate, he stated flatly that certain things he'd been saying for months he never actually said, that certain views he had espoused for months or even years he had never held. It's no wonder Obama had such difficulty in that debate; he was trying to hit a moving target. But I digress.

(I am surprised at the reaction to "Movable Mitt" from the hard right; more to the point, I am surprised by the lack of reaction. I am surprised by their willingness to allow their candidate to back away so sharply from the issues they have called upon him to champion, just to defeat Obama. I wonder how they can be sure which Romney they'll be voting for...the moderate Republican that governed Massachusetts or the harder right-wing Romney we saw throughout most of the campaign. But I still digress.)

Perhaps we should go to a format for debates more like what I remember from high school; neutrally moderated, rigidly timed, with time given to research and prepare answers and with each participant allowed to bring enough research material to form cognizant, well reasoned answers. Such a debate would be thoughtful, insightful, intellectual and bloody damn boring. So boring, in fact, that hardly anyone would watch the damn things and we could all watch sports or reality TV without feeling guilty.

Like most of you will be doing in a couple of hours.

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.