http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-wild-idea-to-fix-the-gop-debates-1434148792A Wild Idea to Fix the GOP Debates
One twist: Let the candidates call in a designated hitter to handle the tougher questions.
By Rusty Hills
June 12, 2015 6:39 p.m. ET
With so many candidates vying for the GOP presidential nomination—there soon may be 18 or more in the race—the Republican National Committee wants to limit the number who participate in the nine scheduled debates. That’s an understandable impulse. If you herd all of the candidates onstage and start throwing questions at them, it could quickly devolve into a cross between “The Gong Show,” “Charlie Rose” and “Family Feud.”
The RNC’s solution is to require candidates to reach a certain “threshold” in the polls before being admitted to the debates. Fox News, the host of the first debate, recently announced that it would invite the top-10 finishers in an average of five national polls from the week before the Aug. 6 event. CNN says it will do something similar for the debate it’s hosting in September, but will toss in an earlier scrum for the second-tier candidates.
Understandably, candidates and all-but-announced candidates who are scraping bottom in the polls right now are not happy. They’ve got a legitimate gripe—this is America, where any kid can grow up to be president, so why can’t any kid grow up to field loaded questions from Anderson Cooper?
But a stage clogged with every candidate is clearly unworkable (where’s Harold Stassen when we need him?). If that ever happens, the best thing for Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio to do would be to simply pass the microphone to one of the outliers and stand around looking statesmanlike.
Here’s a better solution: a play-in. Adopt a wild-card format like those used in pro baseball and football. Let poll-leaders like Messrs. Bush, Walker and Rubio—and anyone who has raised, say, $50 million—sit out the first round, while those limping along with poll numbers in the single digits slug it out. Who knows, Donald Trump might win by a hair.
Once the first wild-card debate is done, tally up the votes that viewers register online and over the phone (1-800-GOP-BLOB), take the top four candidates and send them to the next round, when the big names join the fray. By then you’ll have about nine or 10 candidates. Then make that debate a real elimination round by letting viewers vote to dump however many contestants, sorry, candidates necessary to get down to the eight needed for a quarterfinal. The top four vote-getters in that debate move on to the semis. Then comes the titanic face-off between the two best debaters, as determined by a nationwide phone and online vote that we can pretend hasn’t been skewed by Chinese hackers.
Optional twist: When one of the debates is held in an American League city, let the candidates call in a designated hitter to handle the tougher questions. Just as pitchers struggle in the batter’s box, more than a few of these candidates struggle with softballs, let alone high hard ones.
Remember, the San Francisco Giants started baseball’s postseason last year as a wild card and ended up winning the World Series. George Pataki, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, put on your spikes.
