The sixth Democratic Presidential Debate was Thursday night. It occurs to me that these debates are starting to look a lot like moon landings. Seriously. Anyone remember the sixth moon landing? No? That’s exactly my point.
Yeah, okay. I do remember it. It was 1972 and Apollo 17 was crewed by Cernan, Schmitt, & Evans. But then, I’m a lifelong space geek. Even so, I wasn’t glued to the TV during the mission. In my defense, I was in school.
I have no such excuse as to why I didn’t watch the debate in real-time. I watched it later only because I’m also a political junkie. And I have this blog.
Men walking around on the friggin’ moon… or a Presidential debate in an extremely important election… should have demanded everyone’s immediate and full attention. But neither did.
NASA was generally capable of making the moon landings seem routine even when all of the missions were just a series of narrowly avoided disasters. The Democratic candidates were generally capable of delivering their rehearsed lines even when all of them were just a sound-bite away from political obscurity.
Sadly: Predictable = Boring.
While the sixth moon mission was the last manned landing on the moon, the sixth debate was only the half-way point for the Democratic candidates. Another six Democratic debates are scheduled in 2020. God help us.
I stand by the suggestions I made after the first debate for making things a bit more interesting and informative, but here’s a follow-up idea that would dramatically peak interest in both the debates AND the space program.
Let’s get SpaceX to transport the Democratic candidates to a version of a space hotel for a few more debates. Candidates would compete immediately post-debate for votes from a live broadcast viewing audience that would be factored to mirror the general election’s Electoral College. The two candidates with the lowest vote totals would stay in space; the rest would return to Earth to campaign and prepare for the next debate. This would repeat until the last “survivor” wins the nomination. Everyone would be returned to Earth to attend the Democratic convention where the winner would be announced.
“So You Think You Can Be President?” would be a ratings behemoth. The viewership would be unprecedented; the advertising revenue would be massive. The lead-up revenue would provide the additional funding to quickly advance the technology as necessary. It’s already very close. The broadcast revenue from the debates themselves would dwarf anything Republicans could raise. The Republican convention wouldn’t even be covered by C-SPAN and the Democratic nominee would glide to victory in the general election.
Imagine. No more fund-raising. No more emails begging for money. No more stupid arguments over “wine caves”. No more questions about a candidate’s health or age – “I flew multiple times into space” effectively ends that conversation. No more primaries that have limited relevance to the general election. No more hand-wringing over how to engage young voters. No more looking back. No more Trump.
If perchance you think this idea is completely bonkers, I’d simply ask you to consider for a moment the world in which we currently live.
Yeah. Thought so.