It’s McCain’s idea: he and Obama travel around the country together, possibly on the same plane, and hold 10 unfiltered debates. I hope Obama takes him up on this challenge.

I went to the CNN/YouTube Republican debate in St. Petersburg, Florida, and found it to be an appalling piece of entertainment pretending to be news.

Obama and McCain are markedly different from each other in age, viewpoint, and style. Showcasing their differences one-on-one would help an awful lot of voters make up their minds about which direction they want this country to take, and would almost certainly increase voter interest in the election, and as a result of that interest, would increase voter turnout in November.

I suspect that a McCain vs. Obama road show, with a small, randomly-selected audience at each stop, would be great political theater — in a good way. I doubt that either one would be overtly negative toward the other since both of them claim their ability to transcend partisan divides sets them apart from “traditional” politicians.

All the other candidate “debates” we’ve seen so far in this election cycle have been more negative than positive, and have led to more grandstanding than substance. A series of serious discussions between the candidates and a small audience, without self-aggrandizing moderators, would be truly refreshing.

This would be the ultimate in reality TV. And in the end, as in any good reality TV show, only one contestant would prevail — with the other sent back to the Senate or (I would love to see this happen) offered a Cabinet post by the winner, which would be a lot better than having some guy with a bad toupee yelling “You’re fired!” at the contestant who came in second.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 10:12 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.