My brilliant idea is gaining steam, of course

June 5th, 2008 at 06:41am Pat Cunningham

Eight weeks ago today, I proposed HERE that we forgo any more presidential “debates” with rigid formats and stupid questions from preening journalists — and replace them with Lincoln-Douglas-style encounters.

The idea is especially timely, I noted, since this is the 150th anniversary year of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Well, nine days later, Hillary Clinton CHALLENGED Barack Obama to a series of  Lincoln-Douglas-style debates along the lines I prescribed.  But nothing came of it, and now Clinton’s out of the race.  Yet, my idea endures.

Yesterday, John McCain challenged Obama to a series of “town hall” debates, and the Obama camp COUNTERED with a proposed format “that is less structured and lengthier than the McCain campaign suggests, one that more closely resembles the historic debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas.”

I hope they do it.

But I also must note that a false notion has arisen amid all the buzz over this stuff.  In the Fox News piece to which I linked in the paragraph about McCain and Obama, it is stated that McCain has “suggested the idea of Lincoln-Douglas-style travel together.”

Lincoln and Douglas did not travel together to any of their seven debates.  As we see in THIS article: “Douglas often traveled in a private railroad car, Lincoln traveled any way he could. On at least one occasion he was on a train that was switched onto a siding to sit and wait while Douglas’s train passed.”

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