[hinckley buzzard]

Who would want to be represented by an empty chair in a debate watched by five or six million likely voters? Not Gingrich or Mitt Romney.

No empty chair for Jon Huntsman Saturday night. Barnes is a media TNR douchebag.

[mojo114]

Agree with Fred Barnes completely.
Republican candidates are getting picked over like crows on a dead animal.

[Graybeard58]

Republicans are paying a high price for allowing their presidential race to be dominated by nationally televised debates.

It's no different than when any other sitting president is running unopposed for his party's nomination. After the R. nominee has been chosen, all these negatives brought up in the primary campaign will be old news.

[The Pack Knight]

I didn’t like these debates in 2007, and I don’t really like them now. Barnes is absolutely right that the candidates have “reduced themselves to supplicants” before self-important news media personalities. Fred Thompson pointing out the absurdity of the hand-raising questions should have woken them up.

While the “Lincoln-Douglas” moniker is a tad overused, Gingrich is absolutely right that we need debates that are actual debates, with a timekeeper and no moderator. It should be the candidates setting the agenda, not Diane Sawyer or Brian Williams.

[no dems]

Here's a comment that I wrote for another Thread here on FR and another perspective on how the Debates could help Obozo ride to victory in November 2012 and have 4 more years to destroy this nation:

The Republican Party, and even we Conservatives, are friggin’ pulling defeat from the jaws of victory. All of our candidates, with the help of their supporters, are demonizing and destroying each other during this “Primary Process”. Whomever the nominee is, they will go into the General Election wounded and bloodied and Obozo will just put his foot on their throat and finish them off using his $Billion war chest to just show clips and run sound-bites of all the destructive things our candidates (especially Michele Bachmann) have said about each other. We’ve shot ourselves in the foot. I don’t know if we can recover in the General Election. JUST DAMN!!!