Martin O’Malley Wins The Debate Over The Democratic Debates.
As America tuned in for the primary clashes, the Democrats quit the stage.
Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will face off at the Duggal Greenhouse in Brooklyn, New York, for their latest debate on Thursday night. The head-to-head between the two was a contentious enough affair just to set up: Sanders, who is not winning the delegate battle, wanted a debate ahead of the New York primary badly. The Clinton camp, not so much. But they bungled the debate over the debate after Clinton strategist Joel Benenson suggested that the independent Vermont senator needed to change his “tone” to deserve another chance to debate.
That outburst landed like a lead balloon, and so here we are.
The Democratic Party has reserved the right to stage one last debate in May, but there’s nevertheless a pretty good chance that this week’s session-behind-the-lecterns will be the final outing of the liberal debate season. So it’s a fitting time to reflect upon the most important thing we learned through the Democrats’ series of debates. That thing? Former Maryland governor and 2016 also-ran Martin O’Malley is right when he says the whole process was a steaming crock of manure.
In fact, O’Malley, who recently spoke on the matter for The Huffington Post’s “Candidate Confessional” podcast, believes that more than anything else, the Democratic Party consigned themselves to second-rate status by staging the debates in such a way that guaranteed nobody would watch.
I think it was a great disservice to the republic, actually, that we let that immigrant bashing, carnival barker, fascist demagogue, Donald Trump have full run of the airwaves. And he grew into a phenomenon over those summer months while we heard nothing from the Democratic Party. And even when we did start debating, we didn’t debate in prime time. We debated in a cynical way on Saturday nights or Sunday nights or opposite Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman the week before Christmas.
And the early Democratic debates were an astonishing contrast to what was happening on the dais at the GOP’s affairs. While the Republican candidates were coming to terms with the psychotic, insult-laden fugue state that Trump brought with him to these prime time events, the Democrats were debating policy ideas and party philosophy in collegial fashion.
Any side-by-side comparison might have revealed to viewers that there was one party capable of having high-level discussions and substantive argument. There was never a time on the Democrats’ debate stages that someone’s appearance was insulted, or genitals hefted for girth. Sanders and Clinton were eager to demonstrate their differences, and heatedly spar, but no one’s American-ness was impugned. No one complained on Twitter about their fights with the moderators. There was a general sense that there was one political party of adults, and one that was an insane, schoolboy row-worthy of a William Golding book.
The problem, of course, is that the way the Democrats constructed their own debate schedule made that side-by-side comparison quite one-sided. The Democratic Party’s debate season was designed to be easy to avoid, and it was magnificently successful. As Byron Tau reported in February, the GOP has been winning the ratings war in a rout:
According to an analysis of data from the television analytics firm Nielsen, the Democratic debates have drawn on average about 9.2 million viewers, while the Republican debates have brought in roughly 16.2 million per forum.
That set the stage for the only Democratic debate of the season that was at all noteworthy — the debate in Flint, Michigan. This was the event that was supposed to demonstrate that the Democratic Party was the party willing to shine a light on one of the year’s most pressing concerns — the Flint lead water crisis — and demonstrate that they had the finger on the pulse of the concerns of real people, and that they were willing to share the spotlight with citizens who had lost faith in their government.
It was a bust. As CNN’s Brian Stelter reported:
The Hillary Clinton-Bernie Sanders face-off was the second lowest result for any debate so far this season.
The debate faced stiff prime time competition plus a political reality: The Republican race is much more interesting to viewers right now.
Having a debate in Flint, Michigan, and sharing the stage with actual residents of the contaminated-water plagued city, is precisely the sort of opportunity the Democrats could have used to highlight contrasts with the in-fighting Republicans. But when you put no effort behind ensuring that people watch your debates — when you train viewers to view them as missable events — it’s an opportunity lost.
O’Malley puts the blame precisely where it belongs — on Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. “It was a unilateral decision by the chair and only the chair,” he said. “And when people started to ask questions in that meeting about who made the decision, they were ruled out of order, and sit down, and it’s time for the benediction and there was no discussion of it.”
Of course, there was some discussion in the form of an intra-party insurrection that ended up blowing out into the news as debate season began. Wasserman-Schultz was accused of engineering a debate process specifically designed to benefit Clinton. Wasserman-Schultz made several inane attempts to sting back. Politifact examined her insistence that the debate schedule was designed to “maximize” the potential audience, and found the claim to be “dubious.”'>>>
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/omalley-democratic-debates_us_570ea2c9e4b03d8b7b9f4a6a
= new reply since forum marked as read
