Tag Archives: Presidential Debates

To Debate or Not to Debate

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Author: R. Alan Harrop, Ph.D

Televised presidential debates first started with the 1960 presidential contest between John Kennedy and Ricard Nixon. It is generally believed that the debate process helped Kennedy and harmed Nixon. Debates during subsequent presidential races have had varying impact on the outcome of the races. The Biden regime’s surprise request to hold two debates with Donald Trump raises some questions.

First, the request for debates came on the heels of the most recent polls showing that Trump has a significant lead in key swing states and is gaining support with minorities, whose support the Democrats have always taken for granted. Is this just a coincidence? I think not. The Biden regime must believe that debates can be used to reverse Trump’s lead in the polls. Given Biden’s obvious lack of mental acuity, this is quite surprising and raises the question about who will control the debates and whether they can be stacked against Donald Trump. Let’s look at the how the debates will be conducted.

The channels selected to hold the debates at this time are CNN and ABC. Members of what Trump calls the “Fake Media.” So too with the moderators. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are notoriously anti-Trump, as are likely ABCs moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. The fact that first debate will be held on June 27th before either candidate has actually secured their party’s nomination is suspicious and has never been done before. Perhaps, if Biden performs very poorly, the Democrats can use that as another reason not to nominate him at their convention. If that happens, Trump may find himself having to debate a yet unknown candidate one or more times, closer to the election. The Biden regime is also requiring that there will be no live audience to react to the candidates remarks during the debate. Surely they do not want to have to deal with applause for Donald Trump during the televised debates. Another restriction is that the candidates’ microphones can be turned off by the moderators to prevent comments from the candidates from being broadcast. In the 2016 debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, it was subsequently revealed that Hillary Clinton had been given the questions before the debate.

Trump’s ability to outshine Biden in any fairly run debate is not in question. However, given the Democrat’s track record and their desperation over the recent polls, they will make every effort to sway the debate in Biden’s favor. Here are some reasonable requirements that Trump should demand before final agreement on the debates: (1) Debates should not occur until both candidates have been officially nominated; (2)There must be balance as to the networks broadcasting the debates. CNN should be replaced by NewsMax, preferably, or FOX News (3) Both candidates should be given the main questions they will be asked by the moderators, which is the only way of preventing only one candidate getting the questions and the other not. (4) Candidates should be allowed to ask questions of each other. (5) A non-selected audience should be allowed. (6) Both candidates should be required to take a drug test.

It is all very well, and admirable of Trump to agree to debate Biden “any time, any place” as he has said. However, he is ahead in the polls and must ensure that any debate is fair to both candidates. Otherwise, he may be jeopardizing his campaign by making himself vulnerable to his unscrupulous opponent. There is an old saying “The Pride before the Fall.” Trump should heed this truthful admonition!

 

The DNC Is Rigging The Results Again

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Many of the Democrat party elite do not want Bernie Sanders as their presidential candidate. He is too far left of the average voter. The millennial generation loves him, but they are not known for their voter turnout. A Bernie Sanders presidential campaign might easily end up the way the George McGovern campaign ended. The establishment Democrats want to protect their party. However, Bernie is gaining in the polls and may win the first three primary states. So how do the people who formerly congregated in smoke-filled rooms to choose candidates deal with this problem? Easy–rig the system.

The New York Post reported yesterday that the Democratic National Committee has dropped the fundraising requirements that had kept Mike Bloomberg out of the presidential debates.

The article reports:

Until now, making the debates required some minimal success both in the polls and in raising lots of donations from several states — 225,000 donors, with at least 1,000 from 20 different states, for the Feb. 7 debate.

But Bloomy refuses to spend anyone’s money but his own: “I’ve never accepted a nickel from anyone,” as he wrote in a CNN op-ed, so “I’ve always been independent of the special interests.”

He’s also not even trying to win the earliest primary states — but has still soared to fourth place in national polls of Democrats’ 2020 contest. So he should clearly be onstage in the debates. It’s only fair for him, his rivals and the voters — who deserve to see all the top contenders face off against each other.

Then again, spending some of his own $60 billion has let him lap the field when it comes to advertising–he’s shelled out an unprecendented $278 million on ads since he entered the race in November, including $11 million for a 60-second Super Bowl spot.

His investment has paid off–he has moved into fourth place.

The article concludes:

We’ve been dubious about the DNC’s rules from the start — the way gazillionaire Tom Steyer, a total vanity candidate, gamed his way into the debates was a dead giveaway of poor design, as were the unwieldy 10-candidates-at-a-time early face-offs.

Some fix may still be in: The new rules, starting with the Feb. 19 Las Vegas debate, require a candidate to either 1) pick up a pledged delegate in the first two contests or 2) reach at least 10% in four DNC-recognized polls, or 12% in two “DNC-kosher” early-state polls.

That could limit the field to Biden, Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren — which would look like the DNC rigging the game for Biden.

Stay tuned. I can’t imaging Bernie Sanders supporters putting up with having the nomination pulled out from under them twice, particularly if a brokered convention somehow winds up with Hillary Clinton as the candidate. This could be very interesting.

Stacking The Deck In The Presidential Debates

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Yesterday Lifezette posted a story about the bipartisan commission that is in charge of planning the debates of the presidential candidates.

The story reports:

The men and women who run the supposedly “nonpartisan” Commission on Presidential Debates have put their money where their mouths are — and it all has gone to Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The amount of money is small by the standards of a modern presidential campaign, but it is one-sided. A pair of Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University examined campaign finance reports and found that all of the $5,650 in contributions that commission members have made to presidential candidates during this election season have gone to Clinton.

Republican Donald Trump, who will meet Clinton in the first debate a week from Monday, received no donations from debate commission members. Green Party nominee Jill Stein and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, who both learned Friday that they will be shut out of the first debate, also received nothing.

It gets even better. The article quotes one of the commission members:

Kevin Zeese, an adviser to the Stein campaign, told LifeZette the contributions are further evidence of a bipartisan conspiracy to rig the electoral system against third-party alternatives. And the fact that Clinton scooped up all of the contributions made by commission members this year fits with the fact that she has won support not only from her own party but many Establishment figures in the Republican Party, as well.

“Hillary Clinton has done a really good job of uniting the two parties,” he said. “It’s almost like one party.”

Has it occurred to the commission that the fact that ‘it’s almost like one party’ might be the problem? That is exactly the reason Donald Trump is doing so well–the establishment Republican party is indistinguishable from the Democrat party. The establishment Republican party is no longer the party of smaller government and lower spending–they are now the party of ‘we want to do the spending.’ Donald Trump is not a conservative, but at least he has some sort of business sense.

There is a book called Tragedy and Hope 101: The Illusion of Justice, Freedom, and Democracy that discusses the move to morph the two-party system in America into a system that appears to be a two-party system, but in reality is a one-party system. In this scenario, elections happen, but the same people are always in control. We are dangerously close to that place, and I believe that the election of Donald Trump might be a way to avoid going there. It is going to be a very interesting election–there are a lot of people who are very fond of the system the way it is and will fight with everything they have to make sure it does not change.

At any rate, are you willing to believe that the debates will be fair and unbiased?