Not an accurate debate list, but does it really matter? Who can possibly keep track of all of them?

Dave Barry doesn’t actually summarize the two-night democrat candidates debate.

Miami faces many daunting challenges. We have hurricanes, rising sea levels, overdevelopment, hellish traffic, lunatic drivers and air so humid it’s like breathing whale snot. We have bionic mosquitoes, hallucinogenic toads, termites that can chew through concrete, cockroaches the size of adolescent gerbils and snakes the length of municipal buses. We have alligators lurking on our lawns, lizards lounging on our ceilings and peacocks pooping on our cars. We’ve had bales of marijuana wash up on our beaches and bags of cocaine fall from the sky. We once had a live shark on the Metromover. For a while we even had O.J. Simpson.

So we Miamians have dealt with a lot. But never have we faced a challenge like the one we are facing this week: The largest mass of presidential contenders ever to descend upon an American city.

Nobody is certain exactly how many of them there are, but the estimates range into the dozens, and they are putting serious pressure on our fragile ecosystem. As a local meteorologist explained: “Every single one of these people is constantly emitting policy positions. When you concentrate this many presidential contenders in one place, you have a massive quantity of policies being expelled into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. It’s not a coincidence that since these people arrived, Miami has been hotter than Satan’s jockstrap.”

The reason all these candidates are here, of course, is the big Democratic Debate at the Arsht (Gesundheit!) Center. It’s actually two debates, taking place over two nights. Even then, there is room for only 20 candidates, so they had to qualify to participate based on their performance in polls, fundraising, the egg toss and the swimsuit competition.

his means some declared candidates did not make the cut. These include Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana; Seth Moulton, a congressman from Massachusetts, Wayne Messam, the mayor of Miramar; and Harvey Heckman, which is a name I just now made up, but because I am mentioning him in this column he will probably soon be polling at least as well as Steve, Seth and Wayne.

These debates are the first big Democratic event of the 2020 presidential election, in which Florida will play a crucial role, because we are a “swing state,” defined as “a state that is totally incompetent at holding elections.” If states were “Godfather” characters, Florida would definitely be Fredo. We have NO idea how to count votes. Anybody can win here. In 2016 at least two Florida counties, as far as we can tell, went for Vladimir Putin.

So the stakes are high, which is why this week the political eyeballs of the nation are turned toward Miami. The next Democratic presidential nominee will be one of the people participating in these debates, unless my man Harvey starts to gain traction. That is why these debates are so important, and that is why all of us, as concerned citizens, should consider it our civic duty to watch all four hours of these debates unless something more entertaining is on, for example “Bob’s Burgers” (the Toon Channel).

RTWT

HT: Bill Laffer.