Drama over Tuesday night’s Democratic debate has disinterred an important question from liberals: Why is the party establishment so scared of having voters see their presidential candidates on TV?
As we’ve noted in this space, the Democrats have limited the number of their debates to just six, compared to the Republicans’ eleven. Even worse, they’ve scheduled them for time slots when few other than hardcore supporters will watch. They’ll be like those Potemkin debates in the Senate that you see on C-SPAN, in which a senator is on screen proclaiming rhetorically as though to a crowd, when everyone knows that the chamber is empty and he or she is doing it just for TV.
Except in this case, the TV audience won’t be there either. Tuesday’s debate will be the most accessible of the lot even though it is scheduled to begin during Game Four of a drama-filled Mets-Dodgers National League Division Series. The next debate is scheduled for a College Football Saturday night in November. The third is scheduled for the Saturday before Christmas. The fourth takes place during a three-day weekend in January.
These are not primetime slots. It will be interesting to see if any campaigns buy ad time during these debates, with the audience so scanty. If they do, it will be interesting to know the price.
The Democratic Left is crying foul, as well it might, for it has good grounds to suspect an institutional effort to help Hillary Clinton skate through primary season without having to engage her Democratic opponents. Democratic party regulars seem very thin skinned on the subject, which suggests the critics’ suspicions are true.
When a DNC vice chairwoman, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, dared suggest in a television interview that more debates would be healthy for her party, she was heavy-handedly disinvited from Tuesday’s debate by DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Bernie Sanders, the insurgent socialist opposing Clinton and leading her in some early primary states, cheekily invited Gabbard to sit with his crew, but the damage was done.
“It’s very dangerous when we have people in positions of leadership who use their power to try to quiet those who disagree with them,” Gabbard subsequently told The New York Times. “When I signed up to be vice chair of the DNC, no one told me I would be relinquishing my freedom of speech and checking it at the door.”
But in the Democratic Party today, that is precisely what you are doing if you question Clinton’s inevitability. With her integrity very reasonably in doubt among an increasing number of people, and her favorable ratings on par with those of Donald Trump, the Democratic Party apparatus is circling the wagons around her. Democratic voters are expected go along with this charade and avert their eyes, just as they are supposed to avert them from other revelations of Clinton’s unsuitability, such as her burning a CIA contact in Libya .
Adding insult to injury, the debate format will not permit candidates to argue with each other as they did, under CNN’s prompting, in the second Republican debate. Which is to say, they won’t let all the others go after Hillary Clinton.
The Democratic Party owes it to the voters, all voters but especially Democratic voters, to add more debates for weeknights when people might actually watch. Instead of merely using their authority and their donors’ money to protect Clinton from her own lack of political and speaking skills, the party committee should insist on a process that treats other candidates fairly and produces the most qualified and suitable nominee possible.
