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Protest at the
Presidential Debates - a Photo Essay
by Tim McNerney
 "US ELECTIONS IN DANGER.
SEND INTERNATIONAL OBSERVERS." read one protest sign outside the
debate between Al Gore and George Bush Jr. on October 3rd. It made
me think that if some other country were to silence one of its
candidates the U.S. would be taking steps to assure that there were
"free elections."
The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) might like us to believe
that that those who wanted them to "LET RALPH DEBATE" were
limited to the few hundred people carrying signs that said so, or the
few thousand at this protest. However, according to a September
13th Zogby Poll, likely voters think that Green Party candidate Ralph Nader should be allowed to
participate in the debates by a margin of 61% to 29%. (http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=276)
The raising of the bar for inclusion in debates to 15% of likely voters
led me to make a sign that asked "WHO WILL BE SILENCED NEXT?"
Had this same criteria been applied to Ross Perot and John Anderson, we
would not have been allowed to hear the issues they raised, and Jesse
Ventura would not have gone on to win an election.
So we were left with a debate -if it can be called that- with two
candidates who are so similar there was nothing to debate about.
With no third party candidates to bring up any actual issues, we were
left with what fulfilled expectations to be the most boring debate in television history.
Reuters news service reported that this debate "may have drawn
fewer Americans to their TV screens than at any time since Kennedy and Nixon kicked off
the modern televised election campaign in 1960." The 35 million
viewers at any one time was even lower than the "46.1 million
viewers for the first Clinton-Dole debate in 1996."(http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/nm/20001004/en/television-debate_1.html)
This years turnout is about a third of the 90 million viewers that
watched the 1992 debates which included third party candidate Ross
Perot.
Click Here to See the Pictures
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