No need to call Miss Cleo

There is a humorous drinking game posted on the internet regarding the presidential debates. Every time certain phrases, such as "inconsistent," "hard work" and "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time," come out of President Bush's mouth, take a drink. Every time Kerry says "we can do better" or "I have plan," take another drink. In reality, if anyone were to play this game, severe alcohol poisoning would occur within minutes. The truth is that you don't need to call Miss Cleo to predict tonight's debates. They will be as staged as a Broadway play.\nThere are several reasons why the debates are less than surprising. One would be the extensive 32-pages of rules agreed to by both parties. In the rules, it states the candidates can't address each other, each candidate will be given the same amount of head room in the shot and time limits will be enforced. Even the temperature of the room was agreed on to minimize possible sweating (apparently Kerry doesn't like it to be over 70 degrees or he looks like Roger Ebert in a sauna).\n"The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" joked that the candidates might as well be speaking in different rooms, in different states in different languages. Laugh if you want, but it's not that far off. The debates have boiled down to the same campaign rhetoric over and over again. The informed voters aren't learning much that they didn't already know.\nOne of the major rules of the debate that wasn't followed was the use of reaction shots. Both candidates wanted not to be shown when the other was speaking, but all of the major stations used side-by-side shots to show each other's face. Bush ended up the loser of this because of the annoyance (or disgust, as he calls it) shown on his face during Kerry's speeches.\nTonight's debate will take a different format with a town-hall style Q&A. It was started under Clinton, since he knew he'd thrive in an "Oprah"-like talk show setting. One would think that random voters asking questions to the candidates would mean tough questions that neither candidate would be able to properly predict or prepare for. Not the case. All of the questions will be screened ahead of time, so nobody can throw somebody a fast one. Thanks for taking away all of the excitement!\nDespite the fact that they repeated some of the same platforms as their bosses, the vice presidential candidates offered a far more compelling debate than the presidential candidates. Vice President Dick Cheney and democratic challenger Sen. John Edwards got down and dirty as they interrupted each other and criticized each other's records. They went blow for blow, and you'd never know what they'd say next. How sad is it that the second-in-command debate is better than the tops of the tickets?\nWe know there are a lot of jokes about better formats for debate, such as game shows and no-holds-barred steel cage matches, but the truth is that the debates aren't really debates. They are revolving campaign speeches. Let's abolish most of these unnecessary debate rules and see what these two are really made of.