The Illegitimate 2012 Debates

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

05 October 12

magine going out to dinner in a restaurant that only served Coke and Pepsi to drink. What if the establishment had strict rules against the serving of coffee, tea, juice, water, milk, or any other beverage, and were the only restaurant in town? Wouldn’t it be better to just find a new restaurant that offered multiple choices to customers? The same comparison be made about the bland, exclusionary, corporate-sponsored presidential debates happening this month. You should ignore them, unless you’re interested in hearing rehearsed sound bites instead of challenging questions.

Just as one of Devo’s co-creators said that choosing between Obama and Romney this year is likechoosing Coke or Pepsi, the illusion of choice is continuously perpetuated by the undemocratic Commission on Presidential Debates, or the CPD. While its web site tries to present the commission as a non-profit organization unaffiliated with any political party, the CPD is actually the brainchild of former DNC chairman Paul Kirk and Frank Fahrenkopf, who was chairman of the RNC during Reagan’s tenure and is currently the chief lobbyist for the gambling industry. The CPD is nothing but a corporate-funded creation of both corporate-funded parties, to strengthen their own positions and silence alternative candidates different from the two major parties.

The original debate sponsors, the League of Women Voters, famously stood up to the major parties when they tried to force joint sponsorship of the debate process and hamstring the format and moderator selection. In 1984, both parties vetoed 68 of the league’s choices for debate moderator, until the league called a press conference blasting both parties for trying to soften the presidential debates. And after that, no moderator proposal was rejected, because neither party wanted to be seen as undemocratic.

So the next year, both parties launched the Commission on National Elections, headed up by a former Republican congressman and a former DNC chairman. The commission suggested in its report that both parties should take control of the presidential debate process. And in 1986, both the DNC and the RNC ratified an agreement that deemed the debates would be administered by the two parties. The CPD was formed 16 months later and was chaired by Kirk and Fahrenkopf.

In 1988, the league and the CPD agreed that the CPD would sponsor the first debate, and the league the second. But when the Bush and Dukakis campaign submitted a lengthy memorandum of understanding that dictated everything from who would be invited, and how the audience was to be full of hand-picked partisan voters instead of civic leaders, to what color the numbers on the countdown clock would be, the league withdrew their sponsorship. In a press release, they accused the CPD of “perpetuating a fraud on the American voter” and said they wouldn’t be complicit in the “hoodwinking of the American public.” The rigged two-party debates have been the only option for voters ever since.

The campaigns of both Democratic and Republican candidates are still dictating every last detail about each debate in secretive, back-door agreements that the CPD always unilaterally adopts. Recent grassroots pressure has several watchdog groups demanding to see the secret debate agreement for the 2012 debates between the Obama and Romney campaigns. But don't count on the CPD, which is currently co-chaired by Fahrenkopf and Bill Clinton’s former press secretary, to release it..

The most exclusionary tactic of the CPD is enforcing a <15% rule for third-party candidates to be included in any debate, which they’ve done since the 2000 election. In any election, a third party candidate who receives at least 5% of the popular vote will qualify for millions in public campaign financing in their next bid for office. But if the threshold for being heard in a debate is 15%, that means taxpayers spend millions of dollars on political campaigns that we still never get to hear from.

If the CPD instead went by poll results, where over 64% of those polled in 2000 wanted Nader in the debates, then third party candidates like Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, who are on the ballot in enough states to win an electoral college majority, could be seen and heard by the voting public. But as long as the 15% rule exists, both major parties will always monopolize the debates and ensure that only their candidates get to be seen and heard on a national stage.

When Jesse Ventura ran for governor of Minnesota as a third party candidate in 1998, his approval shot up after his performance in the debates, which eventually netted him 36% of the vote and the election. No matter what the pundits and the party hacks say, third party candidates do have a shot at winning, but only if the debates were set up to include them.

Until the two corporate parties relinquish control of the CPD and allow other candidates to have more of a say, every 4 years we'll always endure the same charade this time of year. These debates shouldn't be treated as legitimate political education until all those who have a shot at winning the electoral college get to debate the other major party candidates.

Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Manchester, New Hampshire. You can contact Carl at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and listen to his online radio talk show, Swag The Dog, at blogtalkradio.com/swag-the-dog.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Would a Republican Candidate Lie About Taxes?

By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

05 October 12

he United States faces a gigantic economic choice next year, and last night's debate centered largely around what Mitt Romney would do about it. Romney's plan is to lock the Bush tax cuts into place, reduce the long-term deficit entirely through spending cuts, enact an additional 20 percent tax rate cut that would disproportionately benefit the rich and cover the cost through unspecified closings of tax deductions. But Romney labored tirelessly, and with evident success, to portray himself in a far more egalitarian light. Every time President Obama described the cost of his tax rate cost, Romney dismissed it as untrue, pledged that his plan would not reduce the current tax burden on the rich, and even implied that he would make the rich pay higher taxes by closing their loopholes.

It was a virtuoso performance. But what does it tell us about how Romney would govern if elected? Here he was making promises about how he would govern that flatly contrasted with his plans. Which promises should we believe? Ross Douthat argues that Romney's soothing moderate rhetoric shows that he is likely to govern as the moderate he presented himself as.

It's worth considering a similar - in many ways, identical - episode that took place a dozen years before. During the 2000 election, the growth of a budget surplus offered the country a major choice. Al Gore proposed to use most of the surplus to retire the national debt and the balance for public investment. George W. Bush proposed a large, regressive income tax that Gore warned would exacerbate inequality and jeopardize the soundness of the budget.

Then, as now, the Republican simply denied over and over that his plan would do what the Democrats said it would. Bush portrayed his plan as devoting just a small fraction of the surplus to tax cuts and described his tax cut itself as benefitting the poor far more than the rich. And you certainly could find circumstantial evidence to suggest that Bush might govern the way he portrayed himself, rather than the way his plan read. He had governed in a bipartisan way in Texas, he had explicitly denounced the conservative wing of the Congressional GOP, and he had surrounded himself with moderate advisers like Michael Gerson and Karen Hughes.

But Bush in fact followed through on what his plan actually did, which happened to be what Gore described it as, and not what Bush described it as. His promises to maintain the budget surplus and direct most of the tax cuts to lower-earners fell by the wayside. What mattered was the party, and the Republican Party was committed to a policy of regressive tax cuts.

The Bush-Gore debates centered primarily around Gore's endless, frustrating attempts to pin down Bush's priorities. I compiled pieces of Bush denying he would pursue what turned out to be the centerpiece of his administration's economic agenda.

Here's Bush in the first presidential debate:

I want to take one-half of the surplus and dedicate it to Social Security. One-quarter of the surplus for important projects …

tonight we're going to hear some phony numbers about what I think and what we ought to do. …

this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers. I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, but he invented the calculator. It's fuzzy math. It's a scaring - he's trying to scare people in the voting booth. Under my tax plan that he continues to criticize, I set one-third. The federal government should take no more than a third of anybody's check. But I also dropped the bottom rate from 15% to 10%. Because by far the vast majority of the help goes to people at the bottom end of the economic ladder. …

After my plan is in place, the wealthiest Americans will pay a higher percentage of taxes then they do today…

Let me tell you what the facts are. The facts are after my plan, the wealthiest of Americans pay more taxes of the percentage of the whole than they do today.

The second presidential debate:

First of all, that's simply not true what he just said, of course. And secondly, I repeat to you -

MODERATOR: What is not true, Governor?

That we spent - the top 1% receive 223 as opposed to 445 billion in new spending. The top - let's talk about my tax plan. The top 1% will pay one-third of all the federal income taxes. And in return, get one-fifth of the benefits, because most of the tax reductions go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder. …

GORE: I think that what - I think the point of that is that anybody would have a hard time trying to make a tax cut plan that is so large, that would put us into such big deficits, that gives almost half the benefits to the wealthiest of the wealthy. I think anybody would have a hard time explaining that clearly in a way that makes sense to the average person.

BUSH: That's the kind of exaggeration I was just talking about. (LAUGHTER)

The third presidential debate:

But the top 1% will end up paying one-third of the taxes in America and they get one-fifth of the benefits.

Under my plan, if you make - the top - the wealthy people pay 62% of the taxes today. Afterwards they pay 64%. This is a fair plan. You know why? Because the tax code is unfair for people at the bottom end of the economic ladder. If you're a single mother making $22,000 a year today and you're trying to raise two children, for every additional dollar you earn you pay a higher marginal rate on that dollar than someone making $200,000, and that's not right. So I want to do something about that.