Opus 2011-333, Headlines: Republican Presidential Debate, Washington, D.C.

I would not usually comment on this but I knew someone with tickets so I was able to attend in person.  Did you see me?  I was wearing a blue coat and a red tie.  It was an interesting experience.  The format included questions from people involved in the sponsoring organizations, Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute.  The questions were well chosen.  Wolf Blitzer tried to keep the candidates on track.  He did a pretty good job of involving everyone.  Some actually tried to answer the questions but there was very little chance for meaningful exploration of differences.  Perhaps these things should be called Presidential Sound Bites instead of debates. 

It was a frustrating experience.  I support the concept of including all serious candidates but it is too big a group for meaningful dialogue.  It went for two hours but if you take the 120 minutes, deduct 12 minutes for commercial breaks and another 10 for preliminaries that leaves 98 minutes.  Even if you don’t subtract the time taken to ask the questions that comes to about 12 minutes apiece. 

I don’t know that it would be commercially viable but it might be better to have a series of 15 minute or 30 minute sessions with combinations of two or three candidates with more freedom to interact.  More people might watch shorter sessions and more substance might be addressed.  The key word here is “might.”

On this day before Thanksgiving I am grateful to live in a country that still allows a wide variety of freedoms.  Let us hope and pray that the courts, politicians and unelected agencies are thwarted in their attempts to make liberty just a word on a coin.

homo unius libri