Three’s a crowd in the first debate

Gary Johnson and Bill Weld — the former GOP governors of New Mexico and Massachusetts who now head the Libertarian Party ticket — should embrace their failure to qualify for the first debate.

The Commission on Presidential Debates set the bar too high for third-party candidates to own a podium at Hofstra University on Monday: To qualify, nominees had to be constitutionally eligible to serve, appear on enough state ballots to have a mathematical chance of winning a majority vote in the Electoral College and show at least 15 percent support in five national polls. With 8.4 percent support in polls selected by the panel, Johnson didn’t make the cut.

The Johnson-Weld campaign has posted an online petition that calls on the debate panel to let the Libertarians debate. With more than 875,000 online signatures, the campaign likely will meet its goal of 1 million. I think that’s the wrong tactic.

Sure, you can argue that the panel is “rigged,” as Johnson said, with too many major party former big shots. If the panel wanted to accommodate third-party candidates, then it could have stuck to its first two criteria. Or it could have had different rules for one of the debates to accommodate outsiders. But that didn’t happen, and it never looks good to ask the folks who control the field to lower their standards so that you can play.

Besides, I think Johnson wins when Americans tune into the debate Monday night and see in the harsh glare of the debate spotlight the best that the two parties have to offer — Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, 54.9 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of Clinton, while 57.3 have a negative view of Trump. You just know that more people will despise them by Nov. 8. If I were Johnson, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the stage when Clinton and Trump finally face off.

Pity the moderator, NBC’s Lester Holt. This silly campaign season has focused on what the candidates say far more than what they do. If Holt sticks to that model and, say, asks Trump if Trump was trying to foment violence against Clinton when he suggested Clinton’s bodyguards disarm. (Quoth the Donald: “She doesn’t want guns. Let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away. It would be very dangerous.”) Trump will be ready to slam Holt as a media elite who hides behind security walls.

If Holt asks Clinton tough questions about her State Department emails, Democrats will target him for the same treatment they reserved for Matt Lauer. My suggestion: Ask Clinton what she means when she says she has taken responsibility for her decision to use a home-brew server for highly sensitive communications. What exactly happens when she takes responsibility?

Earlier this month, it was Johnson’s turn to squirm when MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle asked what he would do about Aleppo. “What is Aleppo?” Johnson responded — confirming that Syria is not a top concern for the Libertarian nominee. Afterward Johnson didn’t try to make excuses. He admitted it looked bad. It’s often the open questions that lead to recriminations.

That’s another reason the Libertarians should be happy to sit out the first dance. Johnson and Weld are right to shift their sights to the October debates. Let Clinton and Trump do their worst to each other — the more voters see of the major party swells with their Machiavellian moves, the more they might crave a real human being who wants the government to do better by doing less.

There is no point denying or sugar-coating the fact that voters this election face a choice between two of the worst candidates in living memory. A professor at Morgan State University summarized the situation by saying that the debates may enable voters to decide which is the “less insufferable” candidate to be president.

My own take on this election is that the voter is in a situation much like that of an American fighter pilot in World War II, whose plane has been hit by enemy fire out over the Pacific Ocean and is beginning to burst into flames.

If he bails out, there is no guarantee that his parachute will open. But even if he lands safely in the ocean, he may be eaten by sharks. If he comes down on land, he may be captured by the Japanese and tortured and/or killed.

In other words, there are huge and potentially fatal risks. But, if he remains in the plane, he is doomed for certain. To me, Donald Trump represents multiple and potentially fatal risks. But Hillary Clinton is a certainty of disaster. Her vaunted “experience” is an experience of having repeatedly made decisions that turned out to be not merely wrong but catastrophic.

The most obvious example has been her role as secretary of state during the Obama administration’s decision to undermine and help destroy the governments of two nations — Egypt and Libya — that were no threat to Americans or to America’s interests.

As a result, two Middle East nations that were at least neutral toward the United States — in contrast to others that are hostile and belligerent — became countries in which extremists created turmoil, and one in which Islamic terrorists killed the U.S. ambassador and those who came to his aid.

President Obama and Clinton inherited an Iraq where terrorists had been soundly defeated, thanks to Gen. David Petraeus’ “surge” campaign, which both had opposed when they were in the Senate.

But the Obama administration turned victory into defeat by pulling American troops out of Iraq, against the advice of top military leaders, setting the stage for the emergence of ISIS and its triumphant barbarism that attracted adherents who began waging a terrorist war inside Western nations, including the United States.

A whole series of disastrous military and foreign policy decisions have led to public criticisms by an extraordinary succession of former secretaries of defense and top generals who had served under the Obama administration. Such public criticisms of any administration, by its own former high officials, are virtually unheard of.

On the domestic front, as well, Trump is an uncertainty, while Hillary is a guaranteed catastrophe. Given the advanced ages of various Supreme Court justices, whoever becomes the next president can expect to have enough appointments to that court to determine the future of American law — and American freedom — for decades after that president’s term of office is over.

Hillary Clinton has already said that she wants to see the current Supreme Court’s decision overturned in a case where they ruled, by a 5-4 vote, that both corporations and labor unions have free speech rights. On other issues as well, she has advocated curtailments on free speech. And without free speech, there is no effective limit on what any administration can do.

On racial issues, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly pushed the idea that blacks are besieged by enemies on all sides, and need her to protect them — in exchange for their votes. Trump has at least supported charter schools, which are one of the few avenues through which the next generation of blacks can get a decent education.

There are no good choices, but nevertheless we must choose.