Okay kids are we ready for the second debate tonight? I know we’re all supposed to be super-excited about it because of thetown hall format and the fact that the questions will be asked entirely by that chupacabra of politics, the undecided voter. Or, as the rest of America calls them: those idiots who still haven’t made up their mind three weeks before the election.
If there is anyone in network news reading this post I would just like to tell you folks that the absolutelast people we want to hear from right now are undecided voters. These are people for whom “paper or plastic?” must constitute a dilemma of existential proportions. Pretty much 90% of Americans made up their minds one way or the other a year ago. Of those who didn’t the question was not, Romney or Obama, but rather, Romney or Ron Paul? Romney or Gary Johnson? Obama or Jill Stein?
Here’s what I don’t get: you folks in the media keep telling us that we live in an era of partisan, divided politics, the most partisan era in recent memory, blah blah. And yet every four years you trot out this fantasy of the undecided voter. It’s really bizarre.
Why don’t we chuck the charade and hear from decided voters for a change? People who have been paying attention to their version of the news, be it Breitbart.com, Fox and WingNut Daily or Democracy Now!, Truthout and Alternet? What are you guys afraid of? Let’s hear some Breitbarters ask Obama about his birth certificate or some lefties ask Romney about Sensata? (No, I’m not making a false equivalency between the two issues here. It does seem to me that the left’s issues with Romney are far more reality-based and substantive than the right’s issues with Obama.)
For that matter, let’s have some on the left ask Obama why, exactly, he believes the economy didn’t recover faster. Let’s hear someone on the right ask Romney about his RomneyCare plan and shifting, er I meanevolving position on abortion. I would like to hear the answers to these questions.
I mean, come on, already. Maybe I’m wrong but it just seems like we’d get a far more substantive debate if we took questions from the people who’ve been paying attention versus the people who can’t figure out how to tie their shoelaces in the morning.