Presidential debates once consisted of two candidates debating each other. Think Lincoln, Douglas.
Today, they consist of Republican and Democrat candidates both being asked what they’re going to do about
1. Climate change
2. Racial inequality
3. Republican abuses of power
You get the idea.
Like everything about the media, the debates are a gauntlet that Republican candidates walk through while Democrat candidates stroll through. Forget the blatant abuses of someone like Candy Crowley, the whole thing is systemically biased against anyone who isn’t on the Left.
If the Trump revolution stood for anything, it was bypassing the gatekeepers to talk directly to the people. The debate format never worked for President Trump and no matter how good a Republican may be at debating, the best they can do is pull of a Pence-like performance of coming off really well, while the media responds by declaring they lost and focusing on a fly that landed on them or some other distraction from what they actually said and the arguments that they made.
There is no particular for this charade to go on. And Steve Scully’s is just the topper on the cake. It’s not a real revelation. There have been repeated signs that the debates were compromised, even at the Democrat primary level, and the commission’s response that Scully’s account was hacked shows how pervasive the corruption is. (I can’t prove Scully wasn’t hacked, but Occam’s Razor suggests that if someone went to the trouble of hacking a debate moderator’s account to make him look bad, they’d have done something more damning, less unambiguous, and more likely to be noticed than that.)
Participating in debates should not be a default, and the more Republicans opt out of it, the more power Republicans will have to set the terms for debates.
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