Earlier this week,  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters that there shouldn’t be any presidential debates between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

She suggested the President would degrade the very nature of debates by lying, interrupting,  and ignoring the moderator’s rules without penalty.

She said she didn’t think Trump has comported himself in a way that any presidential candidate should, and that debate should have “some association with facts, truth, evidence, and data.”

I have watched some of the two nominating conventions. I agree with her, but for different reasons. The debates are relics out of date for more than a century and useless to most of the people watching.

It isn’t that Trump is nasty. Presidential debates have always been vicious and divisive.

In the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson’s Federalist opponents warned that Jefferson would bring about “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery,” and that the air would be “rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil…soaked with blood and the nation black with crimes.”

Jefferson’s own followers attacked Adams, saying, “The grand object of [Adams’] administration has been to exasperate the rage of contending parties to calumniate and destroy every man who differs from his opinions.”

In 2020, the debates don’t make any more sense than the conventions. It’s long past time to re-imagine campaigns. Oddly enough, the pandemic is helping to do that.

The pandemic is sparking much more reinvention than the politicians.

Lots of people found that the absence of a cheering crowd gave speeches in empty halls a lot more clarity and impact. We could actually hear what people were saying, and feel the emotion.

To me, the other problem is that there are two old white men out of sync with the new America, each trying to prove who is tougher and sharper than the other.  That’s why they are so keen to debate. The candidates are too old, their politics too old, mos of their followers too old.

This structure doesn’t work anymore; we need some smartass kid to reinvent it. It’s curious, but I think the only two people in political life who really understand modern information are Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

They ought to call this the Tosterone Debates, the worse parts of white men deciding our fates in a troubled time. These two dinosaurs have already challenged each other to a fight, a year before the debates.

That would be some show. It would be worth watching, but I’d make sure to have my heart medicine handy.

I got nothing much from either nominating convention.

There were very few surprises, I mostly heard what I already knew.

The Democratic Convention told me nothing that I didn’t know about Biden, and Trump was utterly predictable in his posturing, lying, and distorting of the truth. Yes, the Democrats are more diverse. Republicans, not so much. Is there anyone reading this who didn’t know that?

I was impressed with his biggest lie – that he isn’t really the President. Everyone else is to blame. If elected again, he will fix it again. Didn’t we do this four years ago?

It was Biden and Obama who really messed up the coronavirus. And China and Dr. Fauci.

The candidates are chosen well before the conventions, and both become infomercials, not actual nominating conventions. These people have been campaigning for months and months now. There is really little we don’t know about them.

The two men remind me of middle-school playground jerks,  adolescents puffed up with testosterone calling each other names while their posses cheer them on.

When debates began, few people in America ever got to see or hear the candidate’s views.

Lincoln got elected president in large measure because of his performance in seven debates known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which provided the conceptual framework that brought about presidential debates ever since.

These upcoming debates are a throwback to a different world.

The internet, TV, radio, and social media did not exist when Lincoln debated Douglas.  His audience was right there in front of him, they could reach out and touch him.

Everyone else had to rely on newspapers and word of mouth. Both took weeks, even months, to spread the word.

There can hardly be anyone in America who wants to know where the candidates stand on the issues who doesn’t know or can’t find out in a flash now.

We are bombarded day and night with information about these people, more than we ever wanted to know or care to know.

Do we really need to see three debates whose primary focus is to see which out-of-date old man is less senile and forgetful or incoherent than the other?

Personally, I’m not interested. I can’t imagine anyone under 40 is either.

Until the end of the nineteenth century, says the Bill Of Rights Institute, presidential candidates did little personal campaigning, preferring to let their supporters do the heavy lifting of attacking opponents and persuading voters.

Even though the candidates were not campaigning on their own behalf, presidential elections could be intensely personal and vicious affairs just as social media ads are now.

Jefferson, a hallowed figure in American history, could be and often was just as nasty as Donald Trump. We got over it in our history books.

The advent of radio and television revolutionized the election process.

With radio, large swathes of the American electorate could listen to candidates address the nation in real-time. Broadcast debates became an important element of political competition.

But they were not available 24/7, and their sound was rarely of high quality, and voters couldn’t see them.

Today, the process moves much faster and in many different ways.

The problem isn’t that people don’t have enough information. The problem is that they have too much information presented in too many ways.

Due to digital media, speeches and policy papers are available hours, even days before candidates get to announce them. As I write this, President Trump’s acceptance speech is already on YouTube and Twitter, being digested by millions of people.

Trump alone grasps the power of this, Biden doesn’t seem to have a clue. There is hope for Kamala Harris.

The country is extremely partisan at the moment. This has dramatically altered the dynamics of a political campaign.

Very few people change their minds this late in an election now.

Trump keeps hoping that stories like the violence in Kenosha will bring back his suburban women or change the outcome of the election in a swing state, but the life span of even the biggest stories in a few days at best.

Thanks to the Internet, America is a country with no attention span. The life span of a big story in America is a lot shorter than the lifespan of a housefly.

Just a few weeks ago, the New York Times reported that Russia was paying Taliban fighters large amounts of money to kill American soldiers, it was a two-day furor that would have been one of the biggest stories of the year a decade ago.

The intelligence community confirmed it, Trump blew it off.

Nobody even remembers it today or ever asks him about it. He didn’t even bother to talk to Putin about it.

No one cares what I think, and I’m not trying to dictate the nature of campaigns, but I am a media writer and critic.  The debate structure is useless, valuable only to campaing consultants and journalists.

To me, it would be much smarter for each of the candidates to schedule virtual campaigns and town halls, some online some in person.

Biden could spend a few days in Wisconsin, meeting socially distanced locals in an auditorium or talking to them on Zoom meetings.

Beto O’Rourke broke a lot of ground campaigning in person and blogging from his van in Texas.

He almost beat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, thanks largely to his innovative use of media and his understanding of how most people – especially younger people –  get information now.

The two debates had little impact, and Cruz, unlike Trump, followed the rules.

Debates have long outlived their usefulness in our time.

They haven’t been relevant for years, just like political conventions.

Politics needs to be re-imagined, and old white men in their 70’s are not the ones who are going to do it. Nixon awakened us to the new power of television in politics, but there hasn’t been much movement since.

Biden’s entire campaign is based on his decency as a human being; he barely mentions policies.

He spends most of his public time being nice and moderate. No bold ideas are coming from him this Fall. Being safe and “normal” is the whole point, just as being abnormal, divisive, and dishonest is Trump is the point of Trump.

A political science professor who is also a friend told me recently that people are expecting too much if they think either man will be able to profoundly change Washington.

“It matters who wins,” he said, “but not as much as either one would have you believe.”

The system there is broken, and no single person can fix it.

All we can do is lurch from one approach to another and back again. Trump didn’t bring about real change, he just brought about real chaos.

He is still campaigning as if it were 2016 or earlier.

He just doesn’t get that suburban women don’t like him, no matter who is smashing windows downtown. He can’t respond to black rage over young black men’s police killings, which is boiling over and winning white sympathy and transforming politics much more than any three debates.

I can’t imagine what these two will have to say to one another in one debate, let alone three.

All Biden can do is stick his finger in the dike, but he can’t stop the flood. Black women in South Caroling got him elected in that state’s primary, black and suburban women across America will win him the Presidency.

Trump never debates the issues, no one has told him that Barack Obama is not the President now; he has no plan or agenda for fighting the pandemic, or dealing with racial tension. His main economic plan is pretending the pandemic is over.

To understand just how outdated and irrelevant presidential debates have become, it helps consider what a debate is. It is essentially an argument with rules. Debaters are meant to change minds, and to promote civil argument,  not simply enable established positions.

A debate is all about rules, and if no one is going to follow them, a debate makes no sense. Without rules, a debate is not a debate, it is no different than a schoolyard battle of insults. This seems to be what Biden and Trump are heading towards.

A debate is a formal discussion on a particular topic in a public meeting or legislative assembly, in which opposing arguments are put forward.

The aim of a debate is to convince the opposition that one side or another is right.  When the two sides agree on the subject or when one side’s arguments are more convincing than the other side, the debate comes to a close.

In the age of the radicalized and angry left and right, very few minds are ever changed. Candidates use polls to tell them what to believe.

Genuine debates have elements and rules. One side speaks, then the other in equal time. There are timed rebuttals and responses. Everyone gets to speak.

Like him or not, Trump doesn’t follow any rules, doesn’t stay on topic, and lies so much there is really no way of telling if one agrees with him or not. You might remember his now-famous stalking of Hilary Clinton.

If he did this to Kamala Harris, she just might spray him with mace. As it was, he undid Clinton, who was playing by the rules.

You like him or you hate him, nobody is on the fence about Trump.

That is pre-determined. His followers agree with everything he says, his opponents agree with nothing he says.

Biden seems quite sharp and focused to me, especially for a 79-year-old man, but he is not an especially gifted debater.

He suffers from a lifelong stutter and is prone to misspeaking and saying things he has to clarify or apologize for.

I’m sure he will do fine in a debate, but the format favors Trump, who can and will dominate, blow off the referees, invent his own reality, and lie enthusiastically.

It isn’t that Trump is more articulate. He is just a master of dissembling and distraction. And he understands TV.

How can anyone who isn’t Jerry Springer actually handle a public debate with him?

Trump has manipulated, dismissed, or blown away some of the best interviewers in America.

Biden may well acquit himself, but what good will this really to the American people or anybody else who wants to understand what either man will do in the White House?

It won’t do anything for me, and I am also a dinosaur compared to the kids on Tik-Tok and Instagram who might consider voting for a change.

I don’t see many of them getting excited over a political campaign that features two old macho boxers circling one another in a ring, looking to strike a fatal blow somehow while they stagger around to stay on their feet.

Trump wants the debates; he is at ease on TV and understands how it has shortened most Americans’ attention span and moral standards. He is our first thoroughly TV President.

It’s really all he does, that and tweet and plays golf.

Biden is much more effective and coherent in a smaller and more managed environment. So why not play to his strength, not his weakness.

Trump can stage as many rallies as he wants.

He’s already begun to do that, pandemic or not.

Biden has a lot of money and media-savvy staff who can send him all over the country, take people’s phone calls or questions directly and have the environment, time, and space to clearly and thoroughly explain himself people get to know how sweet he is.

In 2016, Clinton supporters believed she had won the debates. Trump’s people were certain he had. It turned out that neither one had, too many people disliked Clinton to vote for her, and too many people loved Trump too much to abandon him.

There is no evidence that the debates shaped the outcome in any way.

I vote against macho as the determining factor in America’s future. We’ve had enough of it. We need a new and modern way to harness the very powerful tools we have to talk directly to one another and speak our truth.

From my seat, this election is all about the Last Stand Of the White Men. And these debates may spur us to go where the country is, not just where the old white men are, and actually communicate with people.

There is no doubt in my mind that if Lincoln were still alive, he would be blogging every day, and holding town meetings all over America on Zoom.

Steven Douglas would be left behind, shouting angrily and loudly into a bullhorn.