There are over 20 contenders for the Republican party's nomination for POTUS. The problem is how to narrow the field to 10 in such a way that is fair and does not exclude a potentially strong candidate. The criteria for entry to the debates is focusing on limiting to 10 based on polls. As Rachel Maddow and Rick Santorum, himself, have pointed out, if polling were used to limit candidates in the 2012 primary debates, Rick Santorum would not have made it into the debates. As it turned out, Rick Santorum came in 2nd to Mitt Romney after winning Iowa and several other states (10?) in the Republican primary. So using polls to determine who gets to debate could potentially knock out a strong candidate whose momentum was just getting started. My husband came up with an idea that sounds a little crazy but one that makes more sense than anything else. His idea is to bring in all 20+ candidates, have each one sequestered in a transparent, sound-proof booth on stage and have each candidate respond to a question. Each candidate would get 1 minute response time (electronically enforced cut-off) and each response played back to the audience, one at a time. This way the candidate would have to respond to the question with no redirection and they would not be able to respond to each other's answers. They could get in 6, hopefully, high quality questions in a 2 hour debate time frame. Okay-sounds pretty good so far, right? Now comes the snark from me-let the audience decide on the top ten via American Idol style.