Before the faceoff between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, many were pleading that Lester Holt, the NBC anchor and moderator Monday night, be a "fact checker."
Any
delusions in that regard should have been dashed right away as he
perpetrated a root falsehood at the very start of the event.
Holt
claimed that the event was "sponsored by the Commission on Presidential
Debates, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. The commission drafted tonight’s format, and the rules have been agreed to by the campaigns."
While the CPD certainly controls much of the event, it's not a "nonpartisan" organization at all. It's about as far
from nonpartisan as you can get. It's totally bipartisan. It's a
creation of the Democratic and Republican parties designed to solidify
their dominance over the public.
But that
original agreement didn't even have the word "debates" in it. This
Commission is the mechanism by which the Democratic and Republican
parties came together to push aside the League of Women Voters, which
had organized presidential debates before 1988. It was to make sure that
the campaigns, not some independent entity, would decide on moderators,
on formats -- and to critically exclude other participants unless both
sides agreed. They simply wanted to ensure "televised joint appearances"
-- which became emblematic of a pretense of democratic discourse.
Holt's fabrication -- he can't possibly be ignorant of this -- is really a root problem of our politics. All the lies and spin from Clinton and Trump largely manifest themselves because each side excuses them because "the other" is worse. That is, the very "bipartisan" structure of our elections is in large part responsible for the dynamics we're seeing.
And
the voters have "no where else to go" because they are in effect held
prisoners by fear. Millions of people who might agree with other
candidates -- Jill Stein of the Green Party or Libertarian candidate
Gary Johnson or the Constitution party or socialist parties -- do
not actually coalesce around those candidates because they fear helping
Trump or Clinton. This mindset probably prevents stronger challengers to
the duopoly from ever coming forward in the first place.
* Pollsters: Pollsters can find ways of finding out what the public actually wants. That is, every tracking poll today has the same format -- some minor variation of "if the next election for president were held today, with Donald Trump as the Republican candidate, Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate, Gary Johnson the Libertarian candidate, and Jill Stein the Green Party candidate, for whom would you vote?" (NBC / Wall Street Journal)
What pollsters are not doing is asking people who they actually want
to be president. That is, there are lots of people who want Johnson or
Stein, but feel like they have to vote for Clinton or Trump to stop the
other. So while media outlets claim that Gary Johnson is at 8 percent in
"the polls" and Jill Stein is at 3 percent in the "opinion polls" --
that's not accurate. They are not opinion polls. Polls are not gauging
the actual views and beliefs of the public. They are ostensibly
predicting a future event. But they are molding that reality as we go
along. Most brazenly because the CPD has set 15 percent in these polls
as the criteria for exclusion.
USA Today, in a refreshing departure from usual polling, recently found that 76 percent of the public want Stein and Johnson in the debates. And here's the kicker: When reformers suggested that someone should be included in the debates if a majority wanted them in, the heads of the Commission rejected the effort. Paul Kirk, now co-chairman emeritus of the CPD, said: "It's a matter of entertainment vs. the serious question of who would you prefer to be president of the United States." But that's the problem: The polls the CPD is relying on don't actually ask the public who they prefer to be president. We could have a "third party" candidate with plurality support and we wouldn't know it because the question to gauge that isn't asked of the public.
* Voters Can Unite:
The other way out of this seemingly perpetual duopoly bind is that
voters come together. That's what I outline at VotePact.org: People who
feel compelled to vote for Clinton because they detest Trump can team
up with their opposite number. This requires real work. Instead of
stopping Trump by voting for Clinton, a progressive can stop Trump by
taking a vote away from him.
The progressive would
undermine Trump not by voting for a candidate they don't trust --
Clinton -- but more skillfully: By taking a vote away from Trump. The
conservative would not feel they have to suffer the indignity of voting
for a candidate that's distasteful -- Trump -- they would instead
succeed in depriving Clinton of a vote.
It's
that kind of outside the box thinking that's going to get us out of the
binds that the ever duplicitous duopoly attempt to impose on the
citizenry.
Sam Husseini is the founder of VotePact.org.