A MATTER OF DEBATE…..

It looks as if the candidates may actually be able to settle their debate over…well, debates. The Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns have been wrangling for several weeks now over how many debates there will be and what format they’ll take. The Gore folks want to use the format proposed by something called the "Commission on Presidential Debates." The Commission wants three 90-minute moderated debates during prime time hours, to be held in Boston, Winston-Salem, and St. Louis. This appears to be fine with the Gore folks, who have sent a letter to the Commission accepting the proposal. Bush, on the other hand, apparently favors a more "informal" setting, such as one of the Sunday morning news programs or Larry King. Of course, the fact that the latter programs are watched by a lot fewer people than would be watching in prime time has no bearing on the Bush proposal, no siree, none at all.

The other candidates, such as Ralph Nader, have chimed in, demanding that they get in the debates as well. They don’t seem as picky somehow about the choice of format. Nader would probably agree to debates during commercial breaks on "Scooby-Doo" if it would get him some press exposure.

Actually, the only real pleasure of watching a presidential debate is in waiting for one of the candidates to screw up. Probably the most famous televised Presidential debate was the first one between Kennedy and Nixon in which Nixon appeared to be dissolving into a puddle of his own sweat. All anybody remembers about the 1976 debates is Gerald Ford’s famous blunder in which he stated that he didn’t believe Poland or the other Eastern European countries "consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union." This, needless to say, came as quite a surprise to the Poles. They would have called to set Ford straight, but the Russians were bugging their phones.

Like many people, I watch political debates for the same reason some people watch car racing: they don’t care who wins, they’re waiting for somebody to smash into the wall and blow up. (This, by the way, is why NASCAR will always be more popular on TV than golf. If Tiger Woods ran the risk of exploding in the middle of his backswing, you’d be selling commercial time for a million bucks a minute. But I digress.)

Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen in the modern arena, and especially not with the staid and stilted format proposed by the Commission and embraced by the Gore campaign. Anyone remember the ’96 debates? Of course not. They were boring. The candidates got up and basically did sound-bites from their stump speeches. And, in much the same way the nominating conventions have become tightly scripted, week-long commercials for the long-settled candidate, we can count on the 2000 debates being a well-rehearsed, well-coached rehash of the same old thing: Gore will call Bush’s proposals "risky schemes" until everybody wants to just smack him, Bush will talk about teaching kids to read (when he’s not answering every criticism by whining about the "tone" of the debate), and most viewers will be clicking their remotes looking for "Baywatch" reruns.

It doesn’t have to be that way. I tell you what would get people watching. You take all the candidates: Bush, Gore, Buchanan, Nader, and that physicist guy that still thinks he’s the Reform Party nominee, and you put them in a barroom with ten bottles of tequila and a keg of beer. When the keg’s empty, the debate begins. Last candidate left standing wins.

C’mon, admit it. You’d watch. Everybody would. The prospect of seeing Nader and Bush going for each other’s throats with the jagged edges of broken tequila bottles would make "Survivor’s" ratings look like the ones for the "Tom Arnold Show."

Or, speaking of "Survivor", you could take a page from their book and put the candidates on an island in the South Pacific. No, wait, maybe that’s not such a good idea. I’d be too tempted to just leave them there.

Dusty Rhoades is a Southern Pines lawyer, who bets Buchanan swings a mean pool cue.