Nine Candidates in Search of an Audience (Gene Lyons)

[hadrons]

Maybe it’s a good thing a lot more people watched the Yankees-Red Sox melodrama on TV last week than the Democratic presidential debate sponsored by CNN. Thanks to the miracle of videotape, I managed to see both. Staged in Arizona, the latest production of “Nine Candidates in Search of an Audience” showcased less the candidates’ merits than their party’s traditional inability to discipline itself even with the most crucial presidential election in a generation approaching.

Then over the weekend, I heard a Republican savant on the radio vending the preposterous theory that Wesley Clark had entered the race as a “stalking horse” for Hillary Clinton. Invoking the Hillary Monster has become the GOP’s surest means of extracting cash from Moron-Americans who haven’t already flung it away on RV excursions to Branson, Missouri or yielded to the pleas of faith-healing televangelists. The Democrat party, the fellow claimed, is being run entirely by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

If so, here’s my advice to Chappaqua, N.Y.‘s fun couple: ditch four or five of these jokers at once. Nine candidates isn’t a political contest, it’s a litter. With all nine standing behind podiums in a semi-circle, the CNN exercise resembled less a debate than a game show, with emcee Judy Woodruff preening, posing, interrupting, scolding, and generally acting as if she--as the representative of Washington’s celebrity press corps--were the star, and the candidates hapless contestants to be discarded in favor of next week’s nobodies. On one or two occasions, Woodruff actually turned her back and walked away from a candidate giving an answer that evidently displeased her.

http://www.ardemgaz.com/ShowIndex.asp?Section=Editorial

[realFedUp]

1. Gene is a lion

good one as usual.