So Rahm Emmanuel and Lindsay Graham have worked out the details with the CPD on the Presidential Debates. The news isn’t particularly surprising- same format as ‘04 and ‘00, for the most part, with three debates between McCain and Obama and one between the VPs, which sounds like a silly undercard but which is where the better drama tends to come from (remember Dick Cheney’s Liston vs. Patterson performance in 2004, where poor John Edwards was so staggered that he couldn’t even come up with the line, ‘yeah, we totally did’ when Cheney said, ‘I’ve never even met you before’ in response to a question about Edwards’ Senate attendance)…

Anyway, getting lost on tangents. The other rule for the debates is that the only third-party candidates who are eligible are those who meet the following criteria:

1. Presidential eligibility. Must be a natural-born citizen, 35 years of age, etc.

2. Must be on the ballot in enough states to actually win the Presidency with 270 electoral votes.

3. Must be polling at 15% nationally by five polls selected by the CPD at an arbitrary date.

Well, it’s hard to argue with 1 and 2, but man, doesn’t the third point seem like a deliberate fuck-you to any possibility of opening the debates to anyone besides a Republican or a Democrat? Which actually is important.

There’s a lot of gloating on the lefty blogs about this- probably not so much on the right, because most of those people secretly wish Bob Barr were the Republican nominee and anyway they don’t resent third parties the way that Democrats do. But it’s really disappointing to see, like, main-pagers on Kos snark about “looks like you’ll be watching from home!” to Nader and McKinney. Not because I want people to necessarily vote for Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney. I’m not going to, and if the contest were a straight-up head-to-head between an evenly-polling Nader and Obama, I’d still be casting my vote with the Democrat in this one, for several reasons. And it’s not even about, like, “breaking the two-party monopoly!” that the Ron Paul and Ralph Nader professional dissatisfieds get all hot about. The American system of government wouldn’t work with multiple parties because of the nature of our legislature (and, if it did happen, you can be damn sure that you’d see a jesus wants women to shut up and make babies part or a get rid of the darkies party long before you saw a progressive party gain any significant influence), and a better, more progressive Democratic party is certainly a more realistic goal than a new brand capturing the hearts and minds of the American voting public.

All that said, having a strong progressive voice in the debate means that Obama can’t run to the center quite so quickly or easily. As frustrating as it was to see Clinton hang around in the primary when Obama had all but mathematically eliminated her from consideration, the fact that we had a Democratic primary that ran from January into the summer is a big part of what kept him honest. A challenger from the left keeps Obama honest (just as, presumably, Barr’s presence would keep McCain from trying to pander to moderates). Do you think he’d have really voted for FISA during the primary?

I understand the need to keep, like, Lyndon LaRouche and the Prohibition Party guy out of the debates, in the name of seriousness. You don’t want completely out-of-touch weirdos up there on stage insisting on free pancakes for every American, or replacing our army with laser-eyed robo-soldiers, or promising to pay for Social Security by auctioning off sponsorship rights to paint the White House like a race car or something. But really, isn’t the ballot-access requirement enough? If a candidate has enough of an organization and enough support behind him or her to get on the ballot in 23-28 populous states, then clearly they’re not actually on the fringe, unless you define the fringe in terms that limit the debate to just how much illegal wiretapping the candidates are cool with, or the exact amount of offshore drilling we want to open up to oil companies (that are going to sell it in China and India anyway)… And that’s not a cause that the Kos-types, or the rest of the people on my side who hate Ralph Nader so much that anything that fucks with him is seen as a victory, should be down with. Arbitrarily setting the bar to ghettoize people with views outside the relatively narrow spectrum that Obama and McCain occupy on a number of issues as “outside the mainstream” means that the things that you wish Obama were more progressive about get categorized as fringe, too.

Why would you gloat about that?