OPINION

The Democratic debates are crammed with candidates who are wasting our time and brain cells. Clear out the center ring and get this campaign started.

Jason Sattler | Opinion columnist

USA TODAY

Democrats have proved they have a big tent. Now it’s time to kick the clowns out.

We have now watched four Democratic debates in which the vast majority of the participants have about 1% or less support in the polls. And what have we learned from this? Way too many names.

With 10 people on stage answering questions about trillion dollar policies in half-minute blips, the debates resembled AOL chat rooms more than a rhetorical standoff between Lincoln and Douglas. Candidates desperate to creep into the next round of debates seek any way to claw themselves into the discourse and end up debating the moderators, spewing questions that often seem they were posed by the White House press secretary, as much as each other.

Let’s take a breath and focus on what we do know.

And the nominee will be ...

Barring a miracle or a mass kidnapping, the Democratic nominee to take on President Donald Trump will be Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg — if he holds on to the donors who helped him rake in more than any other candidate, $24.8 million, in the last quarter.

Four debates have barely changed that.

Biden recognized that Harris almost delivered a TKO to his campaign in the first debate and decided to greet the senator from California on Wednesday with, “Take it easy on me, kid.” It functioned as a variation on Sarah Palin’s “Can I call you Joe?” move that opened the 2008 vice presidential debate. Though it might have come off as smarmy and belittling to some, especially women, it set a tone that Biden would come out swinging, with “P-A-L-OF-O-B-A-M-A” tattooed on his knuckles.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI, AFP/Getty Images

The former vice president also fended off telegraphed attacks by Sens. Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand. Booker took on his criminal justice record and Gillibrand his comments from the early 1980s when, as a senator, he said women working outside the home were "avoiding responsibility."

Biden's responses were far from impressive. But ties go to the front-runner. Biden is nearly doubling his closest opponent in the polls and seems to have shaken off the “Jeb Bush of 2020” sign that many commentators, including me, tried to pin to his back.

Wasting our time and brain cells

Biden’s greatest asset thus far might be not having to be on stage with both Sanders and Warren, whose withering critiques of our political and economic system necessarily indict his four decades at the top of American politics.

Beyond those leading the field, there is a second tier of fine candidates who would be front-runners in a normal year, including Booker, Gillibrand, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. There are a couple who would be formidable were they running for the Senate, namely former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper. And Montana Gov. Steve Bullock deserves some consideration for being the only candidate who has actually won a statewide election in a red state.

The rest of the candidates have so little to lose and such a minuscule chance of winning that they’re wasting all of our time and some of our brain cells. But who can blame a politician for seeking free prime time?

Debates don't match this moment

The Democratic National Committee is doing its best to avoid the debacles of 2016 —as Republicans nominated a birther known for his ability to bankrupt casinos and Democrats were divided by charges that the party's leadership favored Hillary Clinton and Russian hacks amplified those divisions. But the DNC strategy has crammed all the candidates into two NCAA-like brackets that pit the top seed against small state schools lucky to make the tournament.

The result is a mess that makes a mockery of the seriousness of this moment.

This is the most consequential primary of our lifetime for too many reasons — the foremost being that Donald Trump is the president of the United States. He has an attorney general who has all but declared that if a Republican president does it, it’s legal. He wants to appoint a man to run our intelligence community who seems to think investigating attacks on our democracy is a bigger threat than the attacks themselves.

And then there’s the climate crisis.

Inslee has centered his campaign on confronting carbon pollution. As he put it Wednesday night, “I am running for president because the people in this room and the Democrats watching tonight are the last best hope for humanity on this planet.”

Still time to get these debates right

This is both true and — if you tried to digest all four of these messy debates — terrifying.

Ideally, this will be the last Democratic primary for the next eight years, and not because Trump declared martial law and refused to leave office. There is still time to get this right.

Time to cull: Winners, losers and who needs to drop out

Relegating the also-rans to earlier, separate debates in 2016 might be the only good idea Republicans have come up with in this century.

The next Democratic debates are scheduled for Sept. 12 and 13 in Houston. Only Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Buttigieg, O’Rourke and Booker have qualified so far. Let’s hope the DNC sees the wisdom of one debate with just the top contenders from now on.

One clown in the White House is plenty. Let’s clear out the center ring and have a real debate.

Jason Sattler, a writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and host of "The GOTMFV Show" podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @LOLGOP

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