Pseudoplotinus, I like the idea of rotating the candidates so you don’t have each candidate talking for two minutes at a time twice an hour. I don’t think that the debate moderators were much of the problem. Don’t get me wrong, I wish you had Robert P. George out there sticking a knife in one of the frauds (like he did with Bachmann) in every debate. But it isn’t like the Fox News debates were THAT much more productive than the other debates (though they were somewhat better – minus Juan Williams feeding Newt Gingrich straight lines.) If the 2016 Republicans can’t handle Diane Sawyer, then we are all out of luck.

Mick, Romney seems like a personally generous guy, but I’m not sure that people were wrong to look at his public opportunism as being more relevant. We didn’t believe in him, but there is every reason to doubt that he believed anything he was saying. That wasn’t even his biggest weakness. You can be an opportunist and a keen sense of public opinion. Bill Clinton has that but Romney doesn’t. But Romney was a smart, hard working and disciplined guy who got the most of his ability.

Be that as it may, one has to wonder why Republicans and Conservative agree to show up for certain news programs and opinion shows when their own function seems to be to serve as the target for target practice.

A couple months back we batted around the question of whether the CBO made was making an impartial appraisal of the Ryan health care plan costs. The conclusion I came away from that discussion is that the estimations of the CBO and OMB really are different in kind, and one isn’t necessarily more impartial or partisan than the other.

However, this interesting article says that the CBO has now readjusted it’s estimate of how much Obamacare is going to cost… you guessed it, it’s going to cost a whole lot more than they estimated in August. According to the article, what’s different is that with the cliff deal made, the CBO has recalculated the number of people it expects to be on the insurance roll according to the new tax rates. I still don’t quite have a good sense of how the CBO is supposed to operate

But the MSM who was moderating all of these debates were far more formidable for Romney than Obama, which is probably the most important problem with the debates, they were moderated by people who were not only completely clueless about what were relevant issues for Republicans but actually hostile to the point of setting up serves in the debates that the Obama campaign would then spike. Remember Stephanopolus’ mystifying question about contraceptives which turned out to be the match that ignited Obama’s whole Romney against women meme? The RNC would do better to be more deliberate about who moderates these debates.

I do think your right about the circus performer quality of many of the 2012 candidates. Part of the problem was the race for front position took on a whack-a-mole quality where someone who was literally invisible one week has a good couple of debates, makes it to the front position and turns out to be unable to credibly sustain his position once he receives sufficient attention. None of these people should have even made it past the first heat.

It seems to me one solution would be that if we’re going to be doing 20 debates why not have the debates between a subset of candidates which are rotated so that after a few debates everyone is represented, but also receive sufficient attention so we can learn things such as how Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan was rubish, so we wouldn’t have to go through the embarassment of learning about it far later than we should have?

I agree the debates aren’t the problem, I think the problem is how the debates are formatted and executed.