As it happened, I DID make it to the mayoral debate at the Law School, with a box of Puffs Plus and a pocketful of Ricola cough drops (two more sincere product placements for which I am not, alas, being paid), and it went fine. And the student who was going to have to moderate in my place seemed grateful I showed, so I’m glad I did.

I don’t think any new ground was broken — these guys have done a lot of these things — but I’ll share some side notes of interest:

• Steve Benjamin didn’t show. This was disconcerting to the student organizers, who had sort of stuck their necks out deciding to have a debate with only the more viable candidates (a good idea, although I think the artificially objective standard they used was a bit wobbly), and here was one of the main guys not showing. William Tinkler with the Law School Democrats showed me a letter saying that for some unspecified reason Mr. Benjamin had to go to Washington to see Jim Clyburn. In the hours between learning that and the debate hour there was some discussion of Joey Opperman standing in for Mr. Benjamin, but Kirkman Finlay III didn’t like that (nor would I, in his place). So that left us with Joe Azar, Mr. Finlay and Steve Morrison.
• As promised, Aaron Johnson and some of his supporters were there to express their displeasure at his being excluded. But they were well-behaved, as protesters go. They were joined by Sparkle Clark, and then, just before we started, by Gary Myers. This created the ironic situation of having as many candidates who were not invited to participate in the auditorium as we had actual debaters on the stage. But they left after a while. I think they were going to Hunter-Gatherer or something.
• Both Joe Azar and Steve Morrison expressed sympathy for the excluded candidates, letting all know that they would have no problem with the others participating. Of course, Joe took it to another level, in a very Azarian moment — near the start of the debate, he turned to me and said, why don’t we just go ahead and let them come up and participate now? (I forget his excuse for suggesting this; perhaps it was the fact that Mr. Benjamin didn’t show — I seem to have misplaced my recorder, so I can’t check). I glanced at William Tinkler at the back of the hall and saw him shaking his head, although I didn’t really need that encouragement to say to Joe that if the organizers wanted to huddle and make such a decision and let me know in mid-debate (like anyone would do that, having already taken all the heat for making their original decision), but for my part I was going to proceed with the rules we had. And we moved on.
• Fortunately, that issue didn’t distract any more, and we had a fine exchange of views. And the candidates DID have more time to expound on each issue, and we had time for more issues — which, in case you haven’t figured it out, the reason why it is desirable to limit debates to viable candidates. That way, the public gets more of a chance to hear and observe the people who actually might become mayor.

So I congratulate the bipartisan group of students (the aforementioned Law School Democrats and their Republican counterpart organization, the G.O.P. Law Society) who organized the thing, made a difficult decision and stuck with it. And I congratulate the candidates who were left out for expressing their natural disappointment in a civil manner.