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Date Posted: 10:01:11 09/06/00 Wed
Author: Barbo
Subject: Commission on Presidential Debates - Catch 22

The bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) announced the criteria for presidential candidates to
appear in the national debates. To be included, a candidate must meet Constitutional eligibility requirements and be on the ballot in enough states to have a mathematical chance of winning.
However, the commission added a third criteria, forcing candidates to gain at least 15 percent popularity in opinion polls before each debate. My question is simple. WHY?!?
Jesse Ventura won his governorship after the press released his poll ratings as being around 10 percent only weeks before his upset victory in Minnesota. Who's making up these numbers and why?
Everyone in D.C. refers to the CPD as the BIPARTISAN Commission... Doesn't the 'bi' part stand for 2? Where does that leave a third or fourth party candidate? Shouldn't it be the NONpartisan CPD?
When a group of (so termed) unbiased people, as the CPD purports itself to be, blocks a candidate based upon some erroneous number they pulled out of a hat, doesn't that serve to discredit otherwise viable candidates? I think it does.
The whole idea of setting a limit based solely upon poll numbers (which are NOT as accurate as we are lead to believe by the press-3 percent margin of error my ASS!) only serves the two ruling parties.
If you can't get into the debates to begin with, how can you hope to reach 15 percent in the polls or strengthen your position in the public arena? It's like going for a job and being told you can't have it because you don't have practical experience. How are you supposed to GET practical experience if you can't get a job? Catch 22!
Remember when Perot got into the debates back in 92? 90 million people watched those debates. The following year he was disallowed from attending, and the viewership declined to under 50 million.
It is clear that people were interested in hearing viewpoints that weren't on the top two party's agendas.
There's an easy solution here that the CPD doesn't want to address. Create a format in which there are five (if you're going to pull numbers out of a hat, why not that one) seats open at every debate. The top five polled candidates (since they insist upon using polls in the first place as a determinant factor) would get the nod for each debate held. Certainly the CPD and other political groups cannot deny the
viability of third parties like the Libertarians, the Reformists and the Greens, when only about half of the voters in this country actual vote at any given time.
It seems to me that the door's wide open for an alternative here.

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