The table of candidates at Tuesday night’s congressional debate stretched on for so long it looked like the head table at a very large wedding.

For those of you used to hearing that the race for U.S. House is between Democrat Peter Welch and Republican Martha Rainville, this was a reminder that the ballot will be larger than that. Eight names are on the ballot. Six of them showed in Middlebury for the Vermont Council on World Affairs debate.

The four third-party candidates at the debate had quite a bit in common with each other. None is too happy with George W. Bush. They tended to applaud one another’s comments.

They would make an interesting team together. Dennis Morrisseau of West Pawlet, who dabbled with running as a Republican before becoming an independent under the party name "Impeach Bush Now," was the funny, engaging storyteller. Jane Newton of Londonderry, the Liberty Union candidate, was the quiet (it was until closing comments that she mastered the mic), studious one. Bruce Marshall of Rochester, the Vermont Green candidate, offers intensity. Keith Stern of Springfield, an independent, is the steady, calm one. You’d want him driving the van if they were all to go on the road together.

Chris Karr of East Montpelier, the We the People candidate, and Jerry Trudell of Colchester, an independent, did not attend the debate.

The "wingnut" candidates at the debate, as Morrisseau himself described them, were insightful, intellectual, committed to their cause. They reminded the audience more than once that the main parties have disappointed voters time and again.

"We need change in Washington and it’s not going to come by electing another Republican or another Democrat," Stern said.

More than traditional candidates, these ones can say whatever they please. None did that more than Morrisseau, referring to the vice president as Richard "Darth Vader" Cheney, and pointedly telling Rainville that she most certainly could have stood up against the war in uniform, as he did in Vietnam, if she had wanted to.

Rainville wasn’t the only one who was the target of specific criticism. Newton took on Welch over the state Legislature’s agreement to allow dry cask storage at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

The string of third-party candidates will resurface at some, but not most, of the debates. It takes a long time for six candidates to - one at a time - answer a question. It takes a lot of the "debate" out of a debate. You tend to forget the question by the end, making it even harder than usual to tell whether a candidate is really answering what was asked.

— Terri Hallenbeck