On April 23, Yahoo!, The Huffington Post, and Slate, jointly announced that they will sponsor two primary season presidential debates, one for Republicans and one for Democrats. These will be on-line debates, probably in September 2007. They will be restricted to candidates who have announced their candidacies, and they will probably also be restricted to those Republican and Democratic presidential candidates who have been accepted by those parties as “legitimate.” In recent decades, the two major parties have been in the habit of compiling a list of “legitimate” candidates, those who are invited into party-sponsored debates. Generally one needs to be, or have been, a federal office-holder or a Governor to get onto this list, although Wesley Clark and Al Sharpton made it onto the Democratic list in 2004.
I do not think the media should be making lists of suitable candidates following what the ‘parties’ have done so far. I recognize desire to limit the size of debates, but in my opinion the media has much too much power in determining who the next president will be.
Open it up to a larger field, for example including Senator Hagel and General Clark, and encourage the process really to be democratic.