51 to 11: The Odds That ABC Knows How To Run A Presidential Debate

I sat at my press seat at the Philadelphia Kimmel Center checking my watch. It was either running fast or I had been swept into a space time-continuum that was about to swallow up any semblance of a learning experience.

Unfortunately, it was the latter.

It took fifty-two minutes before ABC anchor and debate moderator, Charlie Gibson, decided to ask an actual policy question. The fifty-one minutes prior were filled with questions concerning verbal gaffes, personal associations and whether each candidate would select each candidate as their Vice President (which anyone with half a moderator's mind would know how the candidates would answer).

The first policy question of policy concerned Iraq and that tit-for-tat lasted exactly eleven minutes.

51 to 11.

51 minutes involving Reverend Wright, William Ayers, flag pins and Bosnia fables.

11 minutes on how to deal with what had cost hundred of thousands of deaths, hundreds of billions in dollars and devastation of our military readiness

51 to 11

Major issue asymmetry or the odds against the country making an intelligent decision for President?

51 to 11

Important presidential debate? More like talk radio minutia. Somewhere at Fox News, my buddy Sean Hannity had to be popping champagne. He and the rest of Lords of Loud had shaped the Democratic debate. No fault of Hannity. He's just doing his job. Too bad Gibson and Stephanopolis didn't do theirs.

51 to 11

An insult to intelligence, the American voter and time.

Steve Young is author of "Great Failures of the Extremely Successful" (www.greatfailure.com) that now needs an extra chapter to cover last night.

Comments

[BigRube]

It looks like Sean A. Hannity had ABC on the payroll last night. That wasn't a debate just a bunch of BS. Sounded just like something that Sean A. Hannity would do.

[Countess]

Stephanopolous worked for Bill Clinton and thus is thourougly familar with gutter politics. ABC is like the National Inquirer of politics.

[Cyndee1113]

I am so disgusted with ABC, to me, this was a public lynching.

[stoplooklisten]

I one hundred percent totally agree. With this country hanging in the balance as it does, with the housing market going belly as it has, with our men and women over in Iraq risking everything, with us facing a national debt that would make Bill Gates shudder, we talked about nothing and all are dumber for it. I have a lost my job, am on the brink of foreclosure, have a grandmother that cant retire from a job, a mother in need of serious healthcare, four children, where two of which are going to schools that aren't truly providing them with sufficient education, and two more being primed to learn less and ask me on my list of priorities did I care about a flag pen? Ask me if I cared about sniper fire? Ask me if I cared about republican talking points?....

[MPeter]

Gibson is a mediocre reporter who could still be serving coffee to Peter Jennings if Jennings had not passed away. And the little Greco who failed as a Press secretary in the Clinton years looked like a twit; brainless and self-absorbed.