Opinion: Who’s next off the island?

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OK, now that we’ve been undergoing the 2008 presidential campaign for what feels like two years, it’s time to start winnowing the field. Weed out some of the folks who still act like they believe they’ve got a chance. Just because someone wants to run doesn’t mean we have to listen.

We’ve got eight Democrats still running, not counting Al Gore, who isn’t running for anything these days except a plane to his next $100,000 speech. And we’ve got nine Republicans, not counting Fred Thompson, whose wife hasn’t approved his announcement yet. Not to mention Newt Gingrich, which is easy to do.

We’ve sat through the, what has it been now, about 30 debates and forums on both sides. Well, maybe you haven’t, but we have. And there’s even more coming this week. Do we really need separate debates on every conceivable subject? Pretty soon they’ll be debating whether Southwest Airlines should assign seats.

So far, we’ve figured out the Democrats really, really don’t want to mention anything about radical Islamic terrorists and the Republicans seem to turn all talk about healthcare into fear of socialized medicine like Canada’s, where they spend so much on medical costs they can only afford to have three downs in football.

Most of America is on vacation nowadays getting sunburns and T-shirts that seemed funny at the store and hats they’ll never wear again. They don’t care what we’re doing back here at work. So while they’re away, let’s...

get rid of a whole bunch of these candidates. Maybe then we can stop with the stage-full of candidates waving their hands at Wolf Blitzer like they need a restroom. And maybe we’ll have time for more than 30-second answers on important issues.

Thirty seconds? Where did that come from anyway in serious political debates? Lincoln and Douglas debated for three hours -- seven times. And we still had a Civil War. And that was before fast-forward. Thirty seconds is what it takes to hawk ED tablets or those cars sliding sideways on wet pavement. Do you know anyone looking for a car that slides sideways really well? And while we’re at it, ‘when the time is right,’ would any sober couple ever consider spending a romantic evening in a pair of bathtubs sitting on a front lawn overlooking the sunset?

So we could use some debates where candidates are allowed -- indeed, expected -- to speak for, say, two or three entire minutes on serious subjects. See if they can think beyond the 28-second sound bites they practiced with their advisors last weekend. And allow follow-ups by the questioners, because these guys are really good at talking answers away from the question to other areas so they can utter the phrases like ‘new page’ that focus groups tell them resonate with voters these days.

Of course, this would also require Americans to listen longer than 30 seconds without a laugh track, potentially a major challenge.

Despite the ballot-box-stuffing by Ron Paulites, a Web prediction poll we’ve been running in recent days at the bottom of our Campaign ’08 politics page indicates that among the more than 15,000 votes cast so far, a plurality believes that Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton are destined to be the major party nominees.

Well, that leaves 15 losers. And only 15 months left. Who shall we vote off the campaign buses first? We might have our own set of nominees, but we’d rather learn yours. Go down to the bottom of this page, and if you can find the word ‘Comments’ amid all the other user unfriendly words in boldface, click on it and leave a couple of nominees from each party as the next quitters and your reasons. We’ll publish the polite ones.

--Andrew Malcolm