Joe Lane
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For a viewer, Wednesday’s GOP debate was brutal. In fact, I feel comfortable summing up the things I learned in its extensive three hours using just one paragraph.

Jeb Bush has smoked pot, Carly Fiorina may be the most vicious (though not necessarily best) candidate in the GOP, and Donald Trump believes that vaccines cause autism (despite one of the most respected doctors in the country — and possibly the world — standing 18 inches from him saying that there is not evidence to suggest such a correlation). With the exception of a few small moments, the rest was commentary.

There were certainly the expected comments about track record, true and false statements about one another, misquotations, and the references to proverbial “bad guys” that made the debate seem like nothing unusual. But, on the contrary, this debate was most unusual for one particular reason — I don’t think I know any more about these candidates than I did going into the debate.

And anything I did learn about the candidates was overshadowed by discussions of physical appearance, Florida gambling, pot smoking, and hypothetical code names.

For the next few days, political pundits will continually deliberate over the winners and losers of this debate and the effect of the event on the GOP race. This discussion is, in my mind, futile because of the nature of the debate itself.

The 2016 campaign season has looked more like an episode of “Jersey Shore” than the beginning of the process to elect the most powerful individual in the world. The GOP race has proven so entertaining that half of the country has forgotten they don’t truly care who wins the Republican nomination because they wouldn’t vote for that individual anyway.

The debate itself and the lines uttered by the candidates felt all too contrived to be genuine, even those spoken with passion such as Bush’s comments about his wife and brother.

Of course, the impassioned pieces of information and personal experiences that Fiorina discussed drew the attention of many. But her claim that on Day One in the Oval Office, she plans to call her good friend “Bibi Netanyahu,” for example, doesn’t carry much weight when she stole that line verbatim from her first debate.

But the reality is, speaking with conviction cannot be considered enough to qualify a candidate to be the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world — to have her or his hand on the button controlling our nuclear arsenal.

Twenty-three million viewers tuned in, according to CNN, to watch the candidates exchange one-liners and chuckle at the missteps of one another. Twenty-three million individuals spent up to three hours of their lives learning, I believe, next to nothing. Looking back at the history of presidential debates, however, we can see that learning nothing does not mean the debate was useless, unfortunately.

Fifty-five years ago, the first televised debate took place between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. According to History.com, “Despite Nixon’s exhaustion and Kennedy’s preparedness, the Republican and Democrat were more or less evenly matched when it came to substance. Each held forth skillfully and presented remarkably similar agendas.” Yet, JFK has been historically held as the victor in that debate — largely because of his appearance and demeanor on television.

In the 1960 debate between Nixon and Kennedy, fortunately, there was substance, but there was something bigger at play. The way Nixon carried himself during that debate greatly affected his eventual loss to Kennedy.

It’s up to the voters to not let Wednesday’s three-hour reality show affect their decision too much.