Whoever Won the 2012 Presidential Debates, the People Lost

With all the buzz of which candidate did well during each of the debates, it is really quite easy to lose track of the most important part of these, what used to be, vital pieces of information for both decided and undecided voters. Veiled by the ‘performances’ large media conglomerates so love to sensationalize and sell to the masses, we no longer see debates for what they should be. We no longer use them to judge a candidate’s position on a topic, or to learn more about how a candidate would act in office. We see a dumbed down version, where the only thing that matters is who ‘won’ or who ‘lost’. While this is horrible, it does tend to be what the masses want, or the media couldn't sell it so well, could they? Regardless of who is to blame, the fact of the matter stands: these debates are no longer the tool they used to be, and are farces of something that used to be useful.

Throughout the three debates, we saw both, and that it is only two is another problem, candidates not just fail to answer numerous questions in an adequate fashion, but actually avoid questions entirely. When they finally, rarely answer a question, the answer we receive is so convoluted and twisted that it is nearly impossible to tell what the candidate really means with what they see. More recently, though, we have seen Governor Romney change his views from week to week, debate to debate, which only makes it harder to take what he says seriously, and harms his reputability. His ever changing position was only part of the cause of President Obama’s ‘poor’ ‘performance’ in the first debate, combined with what many viewed as a serious lack of respect for the President during that debate and especially the next. Meanwhile, the President appeared to not even care about his participation in the first debate, something that he should hold near and dear to his heart, to help the American people to the best of his ability, even if that means helping them to elect an opponent who they might believe will do a better job than he himself has.

As if these problems did not make the situation bad enough, these debates fail to truly encompass the entirety of opinions represented within the ballot. Even the more popular third party candidates such as Jill Stein and Gary Johnson were denied entry into the debates based on archaic rules that prevent the current bipartisan system from falling out of power. This limits further the already limited discussion, which is already only on topics that the two ruling parties agree are fair game to talk about, and so what we see in the debates is a severely narrow-minded view of what is really important in American politics. No matter who won these three debates, it is the American people who lost.