A confession: I didn't watch any of the debates -- and a suggestion for the future

And I'm not really sorry about it.

Everything I've read before and after each of the debates confirms my belief that, whatever revelatory value presidential debates may have had in the past, they are now so programmed and stultified that virtually nothing of consequence emerges from them.

Not like 1976 when Gerald Ford said Poland was a "free country." (Maybe he thought the Warsaw Pact referred to a treaty concluded at Warsaw, Indiana.) Or in 1984 when Ronald Reagan defused growing concern that he was getting too old for the job by quipping that he would not hold Walter Mondale's 'youth and inexperience' against him. Even Mondale laughed.

In the modern debate, though, with its pages and pages of protocol, nothing gets out that isn't pre-packaged or programmed. And McCain backers think their man wins and Obama backers think their man wins and various McCain and Obama backers pretend to be 'undecided' and repeat talking points that support their man to credulous media interviewers. (If you think I've missed something, tell me in a comment... and tell me what I missed and why I should have seen it.)

In the meantime, I propose a reform: Next time out, let's put a couple of cameras in a very small room. A small room with two chairs. Bolted to the floor. Put the candidates inside -- with no notes -- and lock the doors behind them. Don't let them out for 120 minutes and broadcast what happens.

The first half hour will be taken up with each candidate reciting his (or her) prepared stump speech, trying to recast it in Fireside Chat mode. Maybe the next half hour will be taken up with the candidates glowering at each other. But, I believe, eventually the candidates would have to talk, to each other and to the American people.

We might actually learn something about what makes each of them tick.

Because, really, what we should choose in a presidential election is not a candidate's platform, but his (or her) decision-making process. Events always seem to outstrip platforms. It's how a President reacts to these unforeseen circumstances that forms the basis of History's judgment.