Judging by the coverage of this election season, you’d think there were only two people in the running to be president. Narrowing the pool of presidential candidates to just two “front-runners,” a process significantly aided by the media as well as by donors and major players from both the Democratic and Republican parties, constitutes a serious threat to the American democratic ideal for myriad reasons — not the least of which is that the potentially transformative ideas coming from the so-called outsiders are cut out of national political discourse.

In these clips, award-winning journalist and Truthdig contributor Chris Hedges does his part to give independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader and Constitution Party nominee Chuck Baldwin a (televised) forum to debate each other and to describe what they stand for and what they believe would constitute “change” for the country. The debate took place Thursday night at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., and was broadcast live on C-SPAN 2.

C-SPAN via YouTube:

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