To fix the debates, rip them out of the hands of the biased & clueless political class

The late William F. Buckley once famously said: "I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty."

That's the attitude we need to take if we want to see fair and informative presidential debates in the near and more distant future.

Because it's the so-called elites from Washington and the news media who have dominated our presidential debates for way too long, and with disastrous results.

It wasn't just the chaotic loss of decorum in Tuesday night's debate that made the entire process difficult to watch, but the biased questions and behavior from moderator Chris Wallace befouled the experience as well. The next debate moderator is C-SPAN's Steve Scully who once worked as a congressional intern... for Joe Biden.

It is kinda hopeless.

So that leaves us with the two-pronged mission of enforcing some kind of order in the debates and cutting down as much as possible on moderator bias.

To accomplish both, we have to let the people take over... I mean really take over.

Here's the simple 2-part plan:

Quiet Please!

The decorum challenge is really the easier one to overcome, so let's quickly solve that right now.

The ridiculous idea some people are proposing to allow the debate moderator to mute the other candidate's mic when the other is talking is simply going to lead to more accusations of bias and favoritism as people tally up how many times one candidate was muted over another.

A fairer plan is to simply put the candidates in booths where they can hear the action but they themselves cannot be heard during the other candidate's response time. This not only kills the interruptions, but strikes the first blow against media professionals and others unduly influencing the process. The booths are wonderfully inhuman, and that's the way the silencing process should be handled.

Who's Asking?

The tougher nuts to crack are the actual debate questions. Trust me, I know this well since I worked as a debate question writer for CNBC's 2015 GOP presidential debate. Yeah, that was the debate where Senator Ted Cruz blasted the entire panel as anti-Republican not long after then-CNBC Washington correspondent John Harwood blew up the affair right off the bat by accusing then-candidate Donald Trump of running a "comic book version of a presidential campaign," (no, I didn't write THAT question). It's still not clear how any network will be able to lure GOP presidential candidates to debate after that.

But obsessing over which questions are the fairest and which issues are the least biased is a fool's errand. No question, no matter how it's worded or by whom, is unbiased. It's simply not humanly possible.

Moderators from the news media or anywhere else, even if they come in panels of five or more, will never be able to adequately stifle their political, professional, cultural, or geographic biases and conduct a debate in any satisfactory manner. This is not only true of today's overtly biased media, but it also goes for our beloved newscasters of yesteryear, and all human beings at all times.

It's even true of good interviewers like Joe Rogan, who many Americans would love to see moderate a debate, (Rogan has offered both Trump and Joe Biden to join him for a four-hour debate on his podcast, Trump has accepted while Biden has not).

So if biased questions are unavoidable, why not let the people who will really decide this election come up with them and ask them themselves?

Who are those people?

Because of the Electoral College system and America's polarized political reality, a handful of states decide our presidential elections. Within those states, there are specific counties that can easily be pinpointed as the areas which will tip their entire states one way or another on Election Day. So, even though about 130 million Americans will cast their ballots in the presidential election, the White House race is essentially decided by just tens of thousands of voters in a handful of counties.

And that's who should be asking the questions.

Who specifically?

In the spirit of Buckley's quote, I'd randomly offer five people in each of the ten most crucial counties a chance to ask a question of up to one minute with two minutes allotted to the candidates to respond. Thirty seconds of follow-up time can also be allowed. And if it takes, two or three hours to get through all of the 50 questioners, so be it. Besides, do we really want a president who can't take the heat for as long as one of those really long Marvel studio superhero movies?

I wouldn't even choose from a list of registered or likely voters, because that would unduly favor entrenched voters who likely have historical biases or one-party loyalties. If they make it into the questioners pool by random luck, so be it. But to get a truly accurate taste of what's on the minds of all the people in the swing counties, it's best to look at everyone living in them.

Of course, security measures will still be in place to protect the candidates and whatever other audience members are present. And the leading news media companies will still have to be present to broadcast the event and provide all the technical support. But that's the beauty of it all: only the crucial blue collar production crews from the elite NYC-DC media will be partially in charge, and that's a group that has far outperformed their colleagues on the editorial side when it comes to adhering to strict professionalism at all times.

Could some of the questions be off-the-wall, offensive, or just plain scary? Sure, but that's the way it should be. As far as shock value is concerned, it's doubtful the questioners could possible say anything worse than most of the American people can easily see each day on cable shows, Netflix, or social media.

Sure, we may still get a bevy of biased and combative questions. But at least they'll be posed by the folks in charge of the election.

Debate moderators, the news networks, the debate commission, and even Big Tech may think they're in charge of elections, but they're not.

Or at least they sure as hell shouldn't be.

If you're worried about the intellectual prowess of the non-media professional questioners, don't fool yourself into thinking the current crop of moderators is more qualified.

For example, when Wallace challenged President Trump last night with questions about "climate science," does anybody really know if Wallace himself is even marginally informed on that "science?" Can he explain the process of climate change and/or even fairly summarize its key theories? I doubt it.

One of the biggest aspects of bias is ignorance, and I've worked with enough TV news anchors over the last quarter century who couldn't read a balance sheet, find Afghanistan on a map, or even grasp some major events in history since 1950 to know ignorance is running rampant in every newsroom in the country.

In other words, there will probably be plenty of the random people chosen from the swing counties who are just as educated, wise, or at least as street smart as any newscaster asked to moderate the debates under the current format. Again. if we're going to be subjected to bias, even born of ignorance, it might as well be from the people who will truly decide this election. Believe me. we've been subjected to it already plenty of times by everyone else.

I'd also like to see how the current and future presidential candidates stand up to real people without their handlers or anyone other than the Secret Service to help them.

Example: when Biden refused to answer Tuesday night the question about whether he supports Supreme Court-packing, he was able to hide behind the interruptions from Trump and Wallace's decision not to press him further on the issue. The whole incident begged the question of why Biden was even at the debate if he wasn't willing to answer key questions at all.

In this new format Biden could try to filibuster, but he couldn't hide. The other candidates couldn't interrupt, but the questioner could and demand he get an answer. In that scenario, we'd really see how each candidate deals with a hostile questioner that truly matters.

As for Trump, it's one thing if he interrupts or gets into a combative tone with Biden or a moderator, but he'll have to think twice about cutting off or insulting a resident of a crucial swing county who's not a politician, celebrity, or billionaire. Trump has shrewdly reserved his spoken and tweeted insults for people in at least one of those three categories, (with the notable exceptions of a local union leader during his days as president elect). Trump would also be under much more pressure to get out of his combative debate persona if the stage was populated by just him and a random would-be voter.

But perhaps the best part of this kind of debate would be the eye-opening process it would truly be for the millions of Americans who have been fed the same cookie-cutter campaign coverage since the invention of TV. The only way to give the American people more of a voice in this process is to literally give them the mic, the platform, and the ability to analyze for themselves what the candidates stand for.

To do that, the elites have to get out of the darned way.