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.