The presidential contest between incumbent President George H. W. Bush and his challenger, Bill Clinton, was in full swing when I arrived in America in early 1992. Observation of the intense competition between the Bush and Clinton campaign teams that year, and the robust national dialogue about the two candidates’ policy positions, formed my introduction to American democracy. It was quite an eye-opening experience. I really miss those days.

In the years since then, I have closely followed another eight—including this year’s—presidential campaigns. Negative advertising and the occasional mudslinging have always featured in them. But most of the contests have involved vigorous exchanges of ideas about domestic and foreign policies and everything in between.

Until the current election cycle, the non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) organized presidential debates. The CPD normally conducted four sessions—three presidential and one vice-presidential. It typically dedicated one full presidential sitting to discussion of domestic policy, another to foreign policy, and the third to an amalgam of topics. That format gave candidates enough time to coherently articulate their policy positions, and provided the electorate a reasonably good sense of where seekers of the highest office in the land stood on the most important issues of the day.

The CPD issued a statement in June saying that it would not organize the presidential debates this year. The announcement referred to a May letter from the chair of the Biden-Harris Campaign informing the Commission that President Biden had decided not to participate in this year’s CPD-sponsored debates. As reasons for the withdrawal, President Biden and his team listed a number of complaints, including problems with the 2020 debates that they felt the CPD had mishandled. Their main worry was that the CPD scheduled its debates too late in September and October, after early voting had already started in many states.

Shortly after sending that letter, the Biden team accepted a proposal by CNN for the network to host a debate in June. The Trump team promptly agreed to it. A second debate, to be moderated by ABC in September, was also arranged at that time.

Judging by the national mood following those June and September debates, it is quite clear that a significant portion of the electorate has been left unsatisfied by what it saw and heard. I am one of those disappointed voters. My view is that the second debate was much better than the debacle in June. But because everything was essentially condensed into one debate on Tuesday night, the two candidates were unable to adequately clarify their positions on many critical issues.

The major problem was that the time constraint allowed both former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris to make misleading statements without follow-ups by the moderators. The most egregious, in my opinion, were the claims by the candidates about record-high inflation and unemployment. The former president said that inflation has been the highest in the nation’s history under the Biden administration, while the vice president asserted that she and President Biden inherited an economy with the highest unemployment on record. While both declarations are debatable, there is at least some partial truth to them. However, they should have been placed into the context of that once-in-a-century event called the Covid-19 pandemic. If neither candidate was willing to make that contextualization, the responsibility fell on the moderators to step in and make that clarification for the audience.

It appears, from the latest statement by the former president, that there will be no more presidential debates in this election cycle. That is quite unfortunate. Given the gravity of some of the issues facing this nation and the world at the moment, the amount of discussion that has taken place so far on most matters is grossly inadequate.

Some Republicans have complained that the moderators were biased against the former president on Tuesday night. They say that he was fact-checked on some of his claims while the vice president was largely left unchallenged. They may have a point, but they have to admit that some of the statements made by their candidate was downright outrageous. That whole thing about Haitian immigrants and pets in Springfield, Ohio was frankly beneath America. Any presidential candidate should be able to discuss the critically important subject of immigration without having to resort to such rhetoric.

Due to extreme political polarization and widespread distrust of the media, such accusations of bias are inevitable. The former president and his supporters have been angling, for some time now, to get Fox News to host a debate. Given the choice, the Democrats would also, quite likely, prefer to have debates on liberal media outlets. Because it is our votes that they desperately seek, we, the electorate, have the power to stop the campaigns from engaging in such station-shopping. We should demand that they allow a non-partisan entity such as the CPD to conduct the debates, as has been the case in previous elections. Whatever problems they identified with the CPD-sponsored events can be fixed.

America is a serious country that deserves serious politics. Other than FIFA World Cup soccer final games, American presidential election debates are events that the entire world stops to watch every four years. We should, on each occasion, serve that global audience a spectacle befitting the great democracy that we are, and should always strive to be.