The Continuingly Narrow Focus of the Debates

So, that debate was a lot better than the previous one. The moderator, more or less, knew what she was doing, both candidates actually said things (okay, granted, one of them didn't say very many true things, but still...) and, most importantly, the Democrat is widely perceived to have won. You know this because the Republicans are saying, well, the moderator was biased and Biden was smiling too much, but Democrats are just saying, hey, we won big. As David Roberts put it, "the GOP complaint...is that Joe Biden smiled & laughed too much while kicking their candidate's ass."

But, but, but... I'm not completely happy. You see, we're now two debates in, and this one had no particular area of focus, it was just the two Vice Presidential candidates discussing the election at-large. And yet, we've basically only had questions on the "to warmonger, or not to warmonger?" part of foreign policy, taxes, health care, the budget, and "the economy" in the sense of whether or not the labor market has been good under President Obama. That's, um, a narrow set of issues. Okay, last night had one late question about abortion, by far the worst framed question of the debate (in that it didn't just ask the candidates about abortion policy or whatever, but framed it around some nonsense about the candidates' personal religious beliefs). But, here's some stuff we haven't yet had a debate question on:

• Immigration
• Climate Change
• Gay Rights
• Women's Issues
• Criminal Justice
• Poverty
• Medicaid (and, you know, Medicaid is a health-care entitlement, we spent a lot of time hearing about other health-care stuff and entitlements, but nothing on Medicaid)
• Affirmative Action, which is in the news these days
• Labor Issues
• Campaign Finance Reform

This stuff is important! It was important when the first Presidential debate, allegedly on domestic policy, didn't talk about any of it. It was still important when the Vice-Presidential debate, allegedly without limitations on subject matter, didn't talk about any of it. It will still be important next week, when Obama and Romney meet for a town-hall debate. I dearly hope we get something about some of this stuff, but I'm not remotely optimistic it will be more than a small percentage of the whole time. Probably we'll just keep rehashing the same old budget-y economics stuff. And then, this stuff will still be important the week after that, when the "foreign policy" debate won't really provide an opportunity to talk about any of this stuff.

And then it will still be important two weeks thereafter, on election night.