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I don’t really hold to the spoiler theory. It is important that we respect the process as a constitutional republic. There is no such thing as a spoiler. If a candidate is not strong enough to win regardless of who or how many are competing against him, well then it is an honest loss. The people have spoken. The absolute WORST thing we can do is to destroy our representative government with well meaning strategy plans of pushing out the “spoilers.” That leads to self-assigned power brokers grabbing unfair advantage by manipulating the public with emotion. What we need is lots and lots and lots of interviews with all of the candidates and good, solid, substantive debates. Then if we end up with a bum it will be the bum we deserve. At least it will be honest. If you protect the process then no bum is permanent. If you do not, then eventually YOU have no say. We will not only always have a bum, we will always have either a tyrant or a puppet.

Am I the only one who fails to grasp the logic of these candidates attending this “debate”? First of all, it's not actually a debate but rather a candidate's forum, put together by one of the most anti-Republican networks in existence. Do any of the potential nominees think that they are NOT going to be subjected to “gotcha” type questions, designed to disparage the two or three front runners? It's way too early to worry about building momentum with a primary season that's still almost eight months away. And what can they talk about besides how much better they each are than each of the other “debaters”? It's almost impossible to keep from letting some criticism about the others slip out which will probably release any inhibitions the others might feel about talking down about their fellow Republicans. To me, it's such an obvious set-up that I'm stupefied that any of these candidates would even think of participating.

The only way I can imagine this not turning into a disaster for at least some of them was if they all surreptitiously got together beforehand and set up some ground rules to prevent the chaos and embarrassment NBC is undoubtedly hoping for. I certainly hope I'm proven wrong but we've all been burned over the last few decades by seemingly intelligent, experienced men and women walking blindly past gigantic warning signs into a minefield they should have known better to avoid.