More than 50 million Americans watched the first debates between John McCain and Barack Obama. This was more than the number of Americans who watched the opening night of the Beijing Olympics and speaks to the intense interest Americans have in the upcoming election.
However, the debates are a political sham. The presidential debates not only exclude legitimate third-party candidates, but are structured in a way to inhibit meaningful engagement between the candidates over the major issues of the presidential race.
Public debates among presidential contenders are a revered American institution. The great 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, which went on for hours, focused the nation's attention on the issue of slavery and the future of the union. Similarly, the debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 initiated the era of TV presidential debates and focused on the future of Cold War America.
The League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan civic group, served as the sponsor of the debates between 1976 and 1987. It employed a five per cent rule of electoral support for a candidate to participate in the TV debate. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter faced John Anderson as a legitimate third-party candidate, and he refused to participate in the debates, contributing to Ronald Reagan's victory.
However, in 1987, the Democratic and Republican parties decided to seize control over the presidential debates. In the midst of the George Bush and Michael Dukakis campaigns, the leaders of America's two major political parties agreed on a new approach. They established the Commission of Presidential Debates (CPD), a private corporation, to organise and run the debates.
During the wake of the 1992 election, third-party candidate Ross Perot was polling 10 per cent popularity and forced his way into the debates, which led to Bill Clinton's victory over incumbent president Bush.
The two executives who currently run the CPD are both established Washington insiders and former chairs of the Republican and Democratic parties. Frank Fahrenkopf is the nation's leading gambling-industry lobbyist and Paul Kirk is a major pharmaceutical-industry lobbyist.
Surprising to many, the debates are not publicly-funded events. Like the Olympics, they are sponsored by major corporations, many with legislation pending before the US Congress.
According to the conservative Washington Times, 'the sponsors have already spent $3.6 million on federal lobbying over the first six months of the year'. Among the