The wagons are being circled: “Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is closing the door on adding more Democratic presidential debates, and said a controversial clause penalizing candidates for participating in unsanctioned debates would stand.” The number will stay at 6, and never mind the complaints from inside the party. No, really, the Democratic leadership is determined to never mind them.
Before we go any further: that Hill article noted that there were two dozen or so primary debates in 2008, which does admittedly sound a bit high. Six, on the hand, is… well, if you weren’t really expecting to have a contested primary then I suppose six would have seemed like plenty. As it stands right now, though, the Democrats are perilously close to having a contested primary despite the fact that their only alternatives to Hillary Clinton are currently Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley. As a former Democrat myself, the idea of that is giving me sympathy heartburn despite the fact that I want to see such a glorious trainwreck happen.
Not much else to say on this one, except of course that the situation that the DNC faces is not the same as the one that the RNC does, thank God. The RNC has been regulating the debate process this cycle because a) we have an excellent candidate list and b) we got a little tired of the Media mucking about in our primaries. The DNC is in this mess because they have an anointed candidate who needs to be almost literally propped up from here to November 2016, and they can’t switch her out because all the other viable options are worse*. So: bad luck for the DNC, huh?
…Mind you, in this particular case you should be probably spelling ‘bad luck’ as ‘Barack Obama.’ He’s largely the reason why the Democrats are in this mess. And why they’re not doing a better job of getting out of it, either.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*That, by the way, includes Joe Biden. He’s even older, probably less healthy, and more intimately annealed to the current administration than Hillary Clinton is. His favorable ratings will sublimate in a flash if/when Biden actually ever runs.
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as ‘bad luck.'” — Robert Heinlein
ISWYDT.
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Mew
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(translation: I See What You Did There, Have A Nice Day)
Imagine if Hillarybot crashes on camera…. who knows what it might be like when rebooted.
DWS does seem to have left herself an “out” .. betcha she can grant passes on that “controversial clause” if, say, Hillarybot comes back speaking Mandarin..**
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** Classical reference (Manchurian Candidate)