John McCain has proposed that he and Barack Obama start having their general election “debates” next week, long before the GOP and the Democrats hold their nominating conventions. This way, the conventions could be rendered safe for the political establishment. If conventions are held – and taken seriously – the Ron Paul people will show up at the Republican seance and begin discussing principles, values, and the purposes and consequences of governmental programs. This could bring about what the establishment fears the most: a significant questioning of modern government, a condition that might prove most unsettling to Boobus.
In either the 1952 or 1956 presidential elections – in the days before “debates” and when the candidates gave nationally televised speeches – a news report told of one mental hospital that turned off the television sets when the candidates addressed the nation. Such speeches greatly disturbed the patients, whose minds and behavior it was the hospital’s role to keep sedated. In this same election, opinion polls were conducted showing mental patients expressing the same preferences for president as did the voters generally.
Perhaps this is what John McCain has in mind when he speaks of the need to return to earlier forms of campaigning for the presidency!
3:05 pm on June 4, 2008
