Time limits in debates bad idea
First off, I think that limiting the candidates’ discussions during the debates regarding the various national issues to two minutes was a blunder of the first order.
In some cases, the candidates are forced to summarize their thoughts and then summarize their summaries, in order to state their positions within the allotted two minutes.
President Obama and certainly Vice President Biden apparently think these debates are a laughing matter. I don’t share this opinion. The president’s writers who think up his one-liners chose to accuse Governor Romney of wanting to eliminate the character Big Bird from public television.
As I interpreted Romney’s condensed (two minutes, remember?) remarks on the subject of the bulging national debt, he was saying that every budget item, no matter how trivial, would be subject to scrutiny if borrowing money from China was necessary to fund it.
Good point — not a bad idea! Of course, transferring a few hundred thousand dollars from the president’s travel budget would support public TV nicely, don’t you think?
Actually, many of the issues addressed should be labeled “side issues” since the major issues facing us are the national debt and unemployment. And these side issues should be weighed accordingly during the debates. It’s not that they are not important, they are, but the “heavies” can sink the ship!
To paraphrase the old saying: “We are doing a great job keeping the rabbits out of the garden, but the donkeys are walking all over it.”
PERRY SQUYRES
Yuma
