Timing alone is noteworthy - it is very early in the electoral cycle to be talking about general election debates. While novel, the town hall series idea is not unprecedented. McCain's letter cites 1963, when Senator Barry Goldwater and President John F. Kennedy "agreed to make presidential campaign history by flying together from town to town and debating each other face-to-face on the same stage." Sadly, an assassin's bullet stopped the debate series before it could get going.

It is worthwhile to recover the debate spirit of 1963. As George Faras shows in his compelling book, No Debate, the current presidential debate system is broken. The problem is that the authority in charge, the Commission on Presidential Debates, is beholden to the political parties and mainstream commercial television interests. This skewed situation where the foxes (corporate and political elite) guard the deliberative henhouse has a track record of producing dueling monologue formats, vapid exchanges, and circumscribed citizen involvement. Indeed, the McCain letter decries the "empty sound bites and media-filtered exchanges that dominate our elections."

We could not agree more. While this form of sportified debate lends itself to sensationalized media coverage and horse-race handicapping, it does little to resupply the nation's precious reservoir of creative public debate energy. Luckily, this type of energy is a renewable resource that can be re-stocked by public-driven approaches to debates in this upcoming presidential election and beyond.

If nothing else, the McCain debate letter awakens us to the possibility. Citizens need not settle for a scripted and stale form of presidential debating. Thanks to this opening, voters and venue hosts are now empowered to participate in the grand "debate about debate" - the discussions that shape the character of specific public debate events.

What is the source of the McCain campaign's new pro-debate drive? It may reflect the rising prominence of John McCain's communications advisor and debate specialist, Brett O'Donnell. As an intercollegiate debate coach at Liberty University, he evinced a strong commitment to public debate, with an admirable focus on expanding student participation rates by bringing new voices into the community.

Early commentary on the town hall proposal has focused on the remarkable way that the McCain letter seems to wrest authority from the Commission on Presidential Debates. It is our hope, now that the two campaigns are engaged in negotiations, that this refreshing call for experimentation and flexibility in the formats and procedures of the presidential debates does not give way to business as usual. The Obama camp's preliminary response to the McCain town hall proposal seems positive in this regard. David Plouffe welcomed the debate concept and constructively suggested a citizen-friendly, "less structured and lengthier" format, one that "more closely resembles the historic debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas." Other promising format wrinkles might include:

• Opportunities for candidates to question each other directly. The way a candidate formulates and asks questions is bound to yield important clues about how he or she might approach the deliberative process once in office.

• More sustained back-and-forth cycles of exchange on focused topics. This could prompt candidates to drill down beyond the surface of polished talking points. Debate is like peeling an onion; you often have to go through several layers of argument and refutation to reach the core of an issue.

• Utilization of new media technologies such as YouTube to expand the pool of possible questioners and create new avenues of citizen influence through the debate process. CNN screened videotaped citizen questions for its July 2007 primary debates. It would be illuminating to see a panel of local citizens and community leaders try their hand at selecting YouTube questions submitted for use in debates held in their hometowns.

The devilish details of campaign debates should not be decided in backrooms stuffed with the mavens of Madison and Pennsylvania avenues. Will particular format features give one candidate a leg up in the political horse race? Perseveration on this question obscures the more fundamental issue at stake, which is whether certain forms of debate can better inform the electorate and energize citizen deliberation.

Recent films such as The Great Debaters and Rocket Science have gone a long way toward raising public consciousness about debate's dynamism. Debating need not be boring, war-like or accessible only to a small cadre of elite participants. Regardless of political persuasion, we should join together to see the McCain campaign's pro-debate momentum gain concrete expression in new formats, venues and voices added into the presidential election process.

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Kelly Congdon (kcongdon@richmond.edu; 804-289-8267) is assistant director of debate at the University of Richmond; Gordon R. Mitchell (gordonm@pitt.edu; 412-624-8531) is associate professor of communication and director of the William Pitt Debating Union at the University of Pittsburgh. Comments on this draft are welcomed, as we are currently editing the piece for possible publication as a newspaper Op-ed.