accidentally deleted, reposted
The debates used to be run by the League of Women Voters, but they had too much dignity to cave to the shameful arm-twisting of the Bush and Dukakis camps. Thusly the Commission on Presidential Debates was formed. The commission is headed by Frank Fahrenkopf, a former head of the Republican National Committee, and Paul Kirk, a former head of the Democratic National Committee. Here's a clip from the CPD wikipedia page: "In 1988, the League of Women Voters withdrew its sponsorship of the presidential debates after the George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis campaigns secretly agreed to a 'memorandum of understanding' that would decide which candidates could participate in the debates, which individuals would be panelists (and therefore able to ask questions), and the height of the podiums. The League rejected the demands and released a statement saying that they were withdrawing support for the debates because 'the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter.' During the 2000 election, the CPD stipulated that candidates would only be invited to debate if they had a 15 percent support level across five national polls. Ralph Nader, a presidential candidate who was not allowed to debate because of this rule, believed that the regulation was created to stifle the views of third party candidates by keeping them off the televised debates." Read the entire League of Women Voters statement! http://www.lwv.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=7778 Nader regularly cites Jesse Ventura as an example of the power of open debate. In 1998 Ventura, who ran as the Reform Party candidate, was polling at 10% for the governor of minnesota before the debates. He was allowed to debate and crawled up in the polls and eventually won by 4 percentage points. This cannot happen on the national level anymore because the 2 major parties run the debates. Pretty cool huh? Can someone give me an example of America becoming MORE free since, i dunno, the Reagan years? This is less a "challenge" and more a "give me a shred of hope so I can sleep tonight?"
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