CLEVELAND -- The place, time, format and cast of Thursday night's first 2016 presidential candidate debate raise the central questions in our public life: Has politics become an irreversible self-parody, comprehensible only as cynical comedy?
Or is it still capable of addressing real problems, such as the decline of the middle class
Cleveland, Ohio, is the perfect place to begin looking for an answer: a proud, slowly advancing Rust Belt city in a state where median household incomes have fallen sharply in recent years -- and more slowly, but steadily, over a 30-year period.
The front page of Thursday morning's (Cleveland) Plain Dealer summarizes the gulf between show biz and real life. "It's GOP debate showtime," reads the headline above a gallery of caricatures of the 10 Republicans who will be on the main stage Thursday night. Right next to it is a story about falling wages.
The Republicans think they know what they are getting into by going to Cleveland, which is hosting this first debate and which, next July, will host the GOP national convention.
But while Democrats and Republicans alike have presided over the state's decades-long decline, it's the current governor and GOP presidential candidate, John Kasich, who will be in the hot seat if Ohio comes up tonight. He qualified, barely, to take part in the main event.
The real focus, of course, will be on Donald Trump, the gold-toned billionaire whose fact-free populist spiel is winning him support now -- even as it makes a mockery of political debate. The format tonight should limit his ability to trump the field, but the sheer number of people on stage will also make any true discussion all but impossible.
It seems all too appropriate that the Fox News/GOP show will air on the very same night that Jon Stewart ends his 16-year run as host of "The Daily Show," the chief aim of which was to make sense of politics by making ruthless fun of it. "The Daily Show" didn't create the public's cynical attitude, but it crystallized a whole generation's sense of politics as tolerable only if seen at an ironic distance.
And what of the people of Cleveland, a Democratic, union-oriented stronghold that Republicans think is ripe for the taking? Do the GOP's leading candidates have new proposals that are serious and that could work -- other than cutting taxes for the better-off and government services for all?
People will be listening, even if there is no Jon Stewart to parse what the candidates say, or don't say.