Brain Trust - James Jay Carafano

Dr. James Carafano is the director of Heritage Foundation's Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies. He came on The Matt Friedeman Show as the Brain Trust of the day. Here are the "CliffsNotes" of his segment.

Tell us about the upcoming debate.

I'm pretty jazzed. This is the first presidential debate hosted by think tanks, so the candidates are going to be challenged by difficult questions.

They're going to have to lay out what their role will be as president in foreign policy.

When you have a 90 minute debate on one subject, no candidate can use the excuse that voters don't know their positions.

Everything you want to know about the debate, you can find on the Heritage website.

 What kind of questions are going to be asked?

This is an open-book test. Nobody has an excuse to say they weren't prepared, or they didn't know what would be asked.

These questions are going to be straightforward questions. How are you going to lead this country?

I think if you cherry-pick throughout all the debates, probably most of the questions have come up at some time.

These are questions these guys have heard before. But candidates answer the question they want to answer, not necessarily the question that is asked.

These men and women have ninety minutes to state their positions on how they're going to keep America safe and free.

The day after the debate is the report of the super-committee. What's going to happen there?

I think this is the untold story: regardless of what happens with the super committee, President Obama has already made enough defense cuts that we are going to have a smaller and less prepared military than we had when he went into office.

The savings that they're spending, they're not reinvesting. They're going to have a real readiness problem.