Tonight's Town Hall Debate

Tonight brings the second debate between president Obama and governor Romney. This time, the format will be a "town hall" with "undecided" voters (chosen by Gallup) getting to ask questions. At least, that is what America is being told, but it is not true. Let me explain:

According to the polls, there is only a tiny sliver of voters who are undecided; right now the figure is 5% or less. For the most part, these are people who have not been paying attention to the election until recently. That means that tonight's questions are supposedly coming from folks who really do not care to consider political campaigns or issues until just before election day. That means that no one ought to look for any penetrating questions from this group.

But to make matters worse, the questions are not really coming from this group. The supposedly undecided voters attending tonight's debate can only ask a question if that question is first written out and submitted to the debate moderator, Candy Crowley of CNN. It is Crowley who then gets to select which of the questions will be put forward to the candidates. That's right, Crowley gets a few hundred questions and then she picks the dozen or so that get presented to Obama and Romney. To make matters worse, Crowley has also said that she will ask follow up questions as the debate proceeds. In other words, this is a debate where Crowley totally controls the questioning. Aside from appearing on screen to read the questions, the undecided voters have no control at all.

Sadly, Crowley is known to be biased in favor of Obama. That means that we can expect Crowley to try to help Obama as the night proceeds. Don't expect hard questions to the president; he will likely get softballs compared to Romney.

It would be nice if the debates could be more about the candidates and less about the moderator.