This is a Cato Special Podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. Last night's presidential debate demonstrated a few things.

For example, candidates claim to be able to fix problems they don't really

control and voters, as well as many reporters, don't know the difference.

John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative

Government, comments.

Many people who, listening to this, will have found the debates and a lot of things going on in this election fairly soul crushing.

But I think there are three themes that we can take from this first debate on the

presidency. One is a typical theme for libertarians which is this these debates seem to be about one thing

which is a sort of rational exchange of arguments for the voters to reach a

rational conclusion about who should be president.

But we notice almost immediately

that everyone's talking about not the content of the arguments,

but rather what will be the effects on the polls,

what will be the reception, who's the

alpha male, all these kinds of issues. So the appearances once again of

politics are very different from the reality and I guess you do have to say it would seem that coming out of this one

Romney is getting the reception that will make him seem more of a viable

candidate and so on. But that's not what it was supposed to be about so once again we have to focus

on really the reality of politics behind the appearances and that's a good point I think one thing to keep in mind.

The other second thing I think I would notice is that as adjunct scholar I Leah Solman noted, a lot of the things discussed in this debate were issues that were really beyond presidential control.

Consider, for example, the short-term economy and the economic performance.

Now, Romney's focusing on that because the economy is pretty bad and it's a very

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