Here’s a video I made as a first attempt at teaching the rubric I’ve designed for evaluating and making Presidential (or national party leader) debates tolerable and perhaps useful.

The goal of these debates, and the Commission on Presidential Debates, is to create a forum to inform voters on the issues. What they leave out is that the issues will be determined by two parties and the national TV news media.

This is a very limited crew to determine what issues matter in a national election. There’s little to no diversity of approach or thought here. Add to it that the Commission says nothing about the role of debate, what it should look like, and cites no study or explanation of why debate is so important and valuable. There’s no model here.

My approach is to take what we have and try to make something good out of it. I propose using the debates as a way of creating more nuanced political positions for yourself by evaluating how close or far from the candidate you are on certain metrics such as the nature of the world, principles, plans, and the role of past action on future success.

Have a look at the video and see what you think. It might be useful to try to use this for the next debate to gain something interesting to post on social media after it’s over and everyone is ready to fight.