Get serious about defeating Trump

Cull the herd, rise to the moment

Democrats have proved that 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 are hovering at 1% or less support in the polls. And what have we learned from this? Way too many names.

With 10 people answering questions about trillion dollar policies in halfminute blips, the debates resembled AOL chat rooms more than a rhetorical standoff between Lincoln and Douglas. Candidates desperate to creep into the next round seek any way to claw themselves into the discourse and end up debating the moderators, who are 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.

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

Wasting time and brain cells

Beyond those leading the field, there is a second tier of fine candidates who would be front-runners in a normal year, including New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.

A couple 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 having won a statewide election in a red state.

The rest 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.

The Democratic National Committee is doing its best to avoid the debacles of 2016 — when 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 resulting mess makes a mockery of the seriousness of this moment.

Still time to get this right

This is the most consequential primary of our lifetime for too many reasons — the foremost being that Trump is president. He has an attorney general who has all but declared that if a Republican president does it, it’s legal. He wants to appoint an intelligence chief 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.”

This is both true and, if you tried to digest all four 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.

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 set 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.