Newt Gingrich is the kind of politician that whether you're conservative or liberal, agree with him or not, you'd be wise to listen to. With that in mind, I wanted to focus on another part of Gingrich's FNS interview to add to Tom's post below. Here's the relevant passage:

WALLACE: Pulling your punches as usual, you called the current campaign process pathetic and compared the candidates lined up in the debates to so many trained seals waiting for fish to be thrown at them. Is the process that demeaning?

GINGRICH: I think the process -- first of all, the actual quotes are all -- and the actual audios -- at Newt.org for anybody who wants to listen to it.

And I believe that the process is fundamentally broken. When you have 10 people or 11 people or 12 people standing in a row patiently waiting for 30 seconds to be allowed to finally answer questions chosen by a personality other than the candidate, I think that you have demeaned seeking the president of the United States to a level that is an absurdity.

I mean, we are faced with enormous problems. In 1860 Abraham Lincoln gave a two-hour speech at Cooper Union. In 1858 Lincoln and Douglas debated seven times for three hours each.

We're faced with problems I think that are fully as great as those that faced Lincoln and Douglas in the 1850s, and yet we have reduced our political dialogue to a point where literally potential would-be leaders of the most powerful government in the world stand meekly in line waiting for somebody to pick a question, and the question can be anything.

I mean, it's entirely up to the television personality to pick what to ask. I think it's a fundamentally flawed system.

Without necessarily agreeing with Gingrich, one must admit there's a lot of truth to this. Today's debates aren't like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. But if your standard for a "good" debate is what is accepted as one of the greatest debates in American history, then there are precious few that measure up.

But more importantly perhaps is that three years after the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the country was fighting a civil war that would kill 600,000 Americans. Gingrich says we today face problems that "are fully as great as those that faced Lincoln and Douglas in 1850s." This is a needless exaggeration, as well as an inapt comparison of the threat facing the country in 1861 versus the threat that revealed itself in 2001. The two are indeed existential threats, but name an issue today that one half of the country would take up arms to defend or destroy against the other half.

In any case, just a sampling of the ways a Gingrich prognostication can make you think. For a slightly contrary (and lighter) point of view, I recall what Charles Krauthammer said of the "endless campaign" back in June:

As a columnist whose job it is to chart every jot and tittle of these campaigns, every teapot tempest that history will remember for not one second, I curse election years. Now I have to curse the year before as well. But for all its bizarre meanderings, the endless campaign serves critical purposes.

The first two -- testing the candidates' managerial and consensus-building skills -- are undeniably useful. But like most Americans, I find it is the third -- the gratuitous humiliation of our would-be kings -- that makes it all worthwhile.