Ben Carson is afraid the eligibility requirements for the Republican presidential debates will be too strict — for Carly Fiorina.
Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who has announced his candidacy for the 2016 GOP nomination, wrote a letter Friday to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus about reports that the party will attempt to limit the number of candidates at the debates.
Some Republicans fear the field is too large to allow candidates to get sufficient speaking time to have meaningful debates. Carson isn’t one of those Republicans, however. “Limiting participation of qualified candidates on this reasoning,” he writes, “I believe, does our party a tremendous disservice.”
But nowhere in the letter does Carson worry that he will be excluded. Instead he advocates for the former Hewlett Packard CEO who is one of his likely rivals.
“I am particularly concerned with widespread speculation that my respected and well-qualified colleague, Ms. Carly Fiorina, may fall victim to those who want to limit debate participation to the more ‘popular’ candidates,” he writes, “and I am serving notice herein, that I could not support such a decision.”
Not making the cutoff to appear in debates can doom lower-polling candidates and the requirements have been criticized as arbitrary. Former Godfather pizza CEO and failed Senate candidate Herman Cain appeared in debates during the 2012 cycle, but former governors like Gary Johnson and Buddy Roemer generally did not.
Cain’s inclusion would seem to bode well for Fiorina, but he was doing much better in the polls than Fiorina. Yet a polling threshold that’s too high for Fiorina would also keep out Bobby Jindal, an incumbent governor, and Lindsey Graham, a sitting senator.
In the early debates of the 2008 campaign, the Democrats allowed former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel to appear in the debates even though he had been out of the Senate since 1981 and wasn’t polling very well.
In 1996, Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes was detained by police in Atlanta after he showed up for a debate to which he hadn’t been invited because he hadn’t done well enough in previous primaries. “As Martin Luther King went to jail in order to secure my right to participate, I go to jail in order to exercise that right,” Keyes shouted as he was led away in handcuffs.
“While I respect the authority of the RNC to sponsor and regulate the debates, I firmly believe in the value and necessity of allowing the diverse voices of our party to be represented and demonstrated for the benefit of the American public’s awareness and information,” Carson wrote to Preibus. “Our treasured Republic deserves no less a commitment by the party.”
