I Love This Idea

Via Ann Althouse: "Why don't they put all the candidates in one debate instead of separating Democrats and Republicans?"

whoever wins is EVENTUALLY going to be pitted against someone from the opposite party....

shouldn't we want to see what they seem like in contrast with their eventual opponent?...

we're having all these 1.5- and 2-hour debates with 8 or 10 people. Why not have a couple 2-hour debates with 18 people each?...

...And the objection can't be: "They're never done it like that before." We've never been in this situation (open field for both parties in presidential primary) in the TV era.

I'll go a step further: what say we randomly choose two candidates from each party to appear, one group at a time, in a series of debates? Guarantee that each candidate will be on...whatever, 2 or 3 times. Some of the debates would have to be of more than 4 people, probably. Somebody else figure that out.

But they don't know - and we don't know - who's going to debate whom until the debate actually begins.

Now that would be fun. Wouldn't you love to see Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich on the same stage at the same time?