I decided to watch a little of the December 6 Republican debate that was hosted by NewsNation. Following the standard format of campaign debates, it began with the panel of media types introducing themselves, then stating the rules most would ignore, and before bringing out the candidates and getting into the matter at hand, came the final bit of housekeeping which was to introduce the sycophants behind them as the audience and admonish them not to applaud or otherwise make noise during the debate which, of course, said sycophants are paid to precisely do.

On came the candidates and off things went the same as in debate after debate since I began watching these things in the 1980 presidential campaign between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. The questioners leveling sanctimonious questions from on high in an order designed to foment the most bickering and slashing among the candidates conditioned by campaign consultants to respond by bickering and slashing. Afterward, those same campaign consultants hold court amongst various media types—spin rooms in the vernacular—to highlight the bickering and slashing of their candidates and proclaim them the victor.

If you concluded from this that the debates are really just a vehicle for media types and campaign consultants to feed off each other with the candidates being interchangeable, irrelevant cogs in this mutual media-consultant backscratching machine and not at all about helping determine the best candidates, you broke the code. Proclaim yourself the victor.

Debates can be useful and despite all the dumbassery, they have, at times over the years, influenced if not decided races. There are famous examples not worth going into, but they’re out there if you are inclined to look them up. The problem is that when you look at those famous examples, what you see is the heavy hand of the media-consultant backscratching machine. They always magnify Nixon’s ghostly pallor against Kennedy’s handsome looks in 1960. Certainly there was a stark difference stemming in part from Nixon’s foolish notion of not wearing makeup though he would always lose in a beauty contest against JFK, but the magnification really serves the machine by reinforcing the importance of candidates having to look good and sound good or the media and the public will roast them which, coincidentally, is what good campaign consultants help candidates avoid. Just ask them.

In many ways today, we should not need debates. Websites, social media, reporting, and commercials make a ton of information available to us that prior generations did not easily have. What a candidate believes and intends to do or keep doing appears to be fairly easy to know. Having said that, I noticed some candidates moving away from listing their positions on the issues, and instead—after putting the arm on you for a donation when you get to their website—dropping links to videos from campaign appearances and other social media postings. You can learn a lot about candidates and where they stand from those links and social media postings, but moving away from the traditional set of position papers on issues like foreign policy, the economy, and border security leaves a gap. Intentionally, for sure, no doubt to avoid having a gotcha of some type that comes back to bite a candidate in the behind.

Of course, everyone in these campaigns will claim just the opposite and say that if you look at the videos and other social media postings, you get what you would get from those traditional position papers. Good try, campaign consultants. You may have the campaigns convinced or at least willing to parrot your talking points, but we know you’re just playing the social media game of more impressions/more followers/more attention that everyone else does whether they’re entertainers, athletes, or now, politicians. And like I already said, keeping potential gotchas off your candidates by having them not stand for very much except in front of a camera or microphone on social media.

All of which brings us back to debates where the presumption is voters will get answers they cannot get elsewhere because the candidates will be asked questions they may not want to face plus they’ll be held accountable by the people asking the questions.Which then brings us back to the media-consultant backscratching machine because the Democrats are favored by the media so they are all for it and the Republican party leadership, though it knows the media part of the backscratching machine is against them, is more beholden to their consultants who are all for the backscratching machine than winning elecdtions, so they go along with the debate dumbassery.

What would work better for truly learning about the candidates would be a simple format of having a subject and letting the candidates speak on the subject. No questions. No followup or fact checking by the sanctimonious media. Simply state the subject—foreign policy—and say, “For this question, candidate X you call it to see who goes first: heads or tails? Great, tails. You go first. Tell us what you think and plan to do about foreign policy. Three minutes…Time’s up. Candidate Y. Your three minutes.” They could do some rebuttals and then move on to the next subject.

Sure, this scheme could give the candidate going second a bit of an advantage by being able to respond to what the first one said, but then the first candidate could make sure to incorporate a response to something the second candidate said prior to the debate. What you hope coming from this would be candidates actually spending some time on a subject rather than responding to the media who are not honest actors as I’ve pointed out. Nothing, of course, stops a candidate from ignoring the subject and going on about something else or worse, engaging in bickering and slashing. If that were to happen, we could have the media types step in and say knock it off, you’re away from the subject and the format, but that runs the risk of having it devolve into the biased fact checking of today’s debates. It really should be the candidates keeping each other honest, but they’ll probably just argue with each other because the consultants told them to argue with each other. Really a vicious cycle.

Maybe this is why thoughtful people don’t run for office because the system is set up to block thoughtful ideas and responses from the process because they’re not conducive to dumbassery. We deserve better, but unless we demand it, we will not get better. We will get more dumbassery and if it were limited to how debates are conducted, it really wouldn’t matter. The problem is that debate dumbassery is increasingly leading to governing dumbassery like we have now with high inflation, open borders, massive debt, and a world in turmoil.That’s more than enough dumbassery, thank you.