The Fox News GOP debate, the first sparring match of the primary season, has been much discussed here on the Corner, but a development today prompts an additional thought. Via New Hampshire’s Union Leader:

On the same August night that Fox News hosts a much-criticized and limited Republican presidential debate in Cleveland, the Union Leader will host a New Hampshire Presidential Forum in the first primary state.
It will be televised nationally by C-SPAN, which will also broadcast it on radio.
Union Leader Publisher Joseph W. McQuaid said the newspaper has been considering such a forum for some time. He said an open protest letter sent Wednesday to Fox and the Republican National Committee from 56 prominent state Republicans should be a wake-up call to everyone in New Hampshire.
“What Fox is attempting to do, and is actually bragging about doing, is a real threat to the first-in-the-nation primary,” McQuaid said. “Fox boasts that it will ‘winnow’ the field of candidates before New Hampshire gets to do so. That isn’t just bad for New Hampshire, it’s bad for the presidential selection process by limiting the field to only the best-known few with the biggest bankrolls. Why the RNC and, especially, its New Hampshire representative, Steve Duprey, would defend this and be a party to it is baffling.”

Because Fox plans to have only the top ten candidates, based on national poll results in the week preceding the debate, onstage, presumably New Hampshire’s event would feature those left out. New Hampshire Republicans being a strong-willed set, it’s not hard to imagine them tuning out Fox and tuning into C-SPAN.

Naturally, Fox and the RNC rushed to extend an olive branch:

Fox News said Wednesday it will hold a forum on the afternoon of Aug. 6 for Republican presidential candidates who don’t qualify for the party’s first official debate that evening…
The new Fox forum, which will be held in Cleveland, Ohio, like the debate, will be open to announced Republican White House contenders who scored at least 1 percent support “in an average of the five most recent national polls, as recognized by Fox News” as of Aug. 4 at 5 p.m. ET, the network said in a statement.

So now Fox will host a JV game before the varsity squad takes the field? That’s nice, but it does not solve the problem — namely, that Fox seems to be putting its thumb on the scales by determining a priori who’s in and who’s out of the first primetime event of the campaign season.

But if Fox is willing to give up airtime to the candidates below the threshold, why not just go all the way toward what seems (to this observer, at least) the obvious solution: Host a two-night debate, or a one-night debate in two parts, that includes every announced candidate. And to make the matchups fair, divide the candidates by lottery: Put all 16 or 18 or however many names in a stovepipe hat; the first half pulled are in Night/Hour One, the second half are in Night/Hour Two.

Sure, that means Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush (or Scott Walker or . . . ) might not face one another directly. But there are nine scheduled debates between August and March; at some point, “top-tier” or “heavyweight” candidates will face one another.

But, of course, the point of the debates is to help voters decide who the top-tier, heavyweight candidates are. Since it’s a debate that can give a candidate a crucial boost, Fox’s proposed metric — pre-debate polling results — puts the cart before the horse. (It also encourages campaigns to play games to get their candidates over the threshold.)

In the interest of free and vigorous debate, each candidate should be given, to the greatest extent possible, a fair chance to make his (or her) case. We can recognize the improbability of a George Pataki presidency, and, simultaneously, that it’s not Fox News’s place to dismiss him.

(Then again, to put all of this in context: I’d like to see a good, three-hour Lincoln-Douglas debate come the general election. So, you know, caveat lector and all.)​