President Barack Obama’s imminent departure from office after eight years will be marked, no doubt, with much pomp and ceremony. He’ll recite a laundry list of his administration’s accomplishments, and point to high-priority items the clock ran out on. Police killings will be on the next president’s to-do list.

The spate of recent killings by police points up not only the persistence of the problem, but the Obama administration’s inability to solve it.

The first of three Q&A sessions (they’re not “debates”) between the duopoly’s presidential candidates takes place tonight at Hofstra University in New York. It’s being hyped like the Muhammad Ali-George Forman superfight of 1974 in Kinshasa, Zaire, but neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump comes to the bout as a true people’s champion; polls consistently show them to be despised and distrusted by voters.

In 42 days, just the same, there’ll be a winner, a new president, and it will be one of the despised and distrusted candidates. Will tonight’s “debate” and the two others to follow fix the fix we’re in?

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