The Need for Real Dialogue

While most of my more conservative friends will probably faint at what I'm about to write here, I must admit that at least one of Newt Gingrich's ideas has captured my imagination. Even though he has not yet announced a run for the presidency in '08 (I'm firmly convinced he still intends to), he has definitely entered the campaigning environment through his new web site www.americansolutions.com (a site I highly recommend, at least for one of its recommendations).

At least Newt and I have one thing in common: we're disgusted with the way this whole election process has been revved up, money'd up, and basically taken away from the vast majority of Americans.

His idea: once the candidates of each major party have been selected through the primary system, then have them sit down, once a week for 9 weeks beginning after Labor Day, in a televised dialogue about a particular issue. These dialogues would not resemble what we've come to see as Presidential debates (designed for short, sound bite material with a journalist firing questions...something a candidate now has to "prep" for), but more so the type of Lincoln/Douglas debates from years ago at Cooper Union in New York with no reporter or moderator and a more lengthy time period in which each party's candidate, uninterrupted, can lay out his/her ideas, thinking, and proposals.

If you want a good idea of what this might look like, I suggest you go to www.americansolutions.com and click on the video of Gingrich engaging Mario Cuomo in just such a discussion, with a brief question period by Tim Russert. The result is that you come away with a much broader view of the speakers, their priorities, strategies, how they think and operate.

I know we live in a fast-paced society and that the news media think Americans only have a short attention span. We probably do, for inconsequential things like advertising and entertainment. But electing our next president is so far from inconsequential (witness all the reverberations from the last election throughout our country), that I believe the American people are thirsting for just such a dialogue.