OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The Republican National Committee has finally grown a brain.
On Friday, the RNC announced it will sanction just nine debates in the 2016 presidential election cycle — and none on MSNBC — as it overhauls a debate policy that proved disastrous in the 2012 campaign.
Fox will get three (with one televised on Fox Business), CNN has two, NBC has two (with one on CNBC), and the other two networks, ABC and CBS, will each get one.
“The committee chose to limit the number of debates, spread the debates across the country by sanctioning no more than one debate per state, allocate the debates over the course of seven months, include a larger conservative media presence and allow campaigns to know and plan for the debate schedule early,” the RNC said in a statement.
In the 2012 cycle, Republicans actually did battle in no fewer than 26 debates and forums. Fox and CNN each held six; NBC and CNBC had four (one, at the Reagan Library, was moderated by two liberal news agencies, MSNBC and Politico); ABC had two; CBS did one — and there were seven “forums.” The schedule was insane; once, right before the New Hampshire primary, all the candidates did a Saturday night debate, then had to race to another early the next morning.
Slate.com put together a handy chart to show that the more Republicans debate, the more they lose. So while last time the debate process started insanely early — May — this time around the first debate won’t be held until August 2015, when the field will already be smaller, having eliminated upstart candidates who never caught on with contributors.
In the post-mortem of the 2012 GOP loss, top Republicans said the debate schedule was not only too arduous, but the party lost control of their message. With most of the mainstream media decidedly left of center, handing the reins of winnowing the Republican field over to them seemed insanity — and it was.
The MSNBC-Politico debate was clearly biased, but it was at a late debate with CNN host Candy Crowley that Republicans finally found out just how bad was their debate schedule. In that debate, GOP nominee Mitt Romney took direct aim at President Obama, asserting that he had failed to call the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans “an act of terror.”
In a shocking move, the CNN moderator stepped in and said: “He did in fact, sir.” (She has since left, so look for Wolf Blitzer to handle the debates this time around.)
But the debate schedule was a mess long before then. Republicans candidates spent months bashing each other, pushing candidates further and further right (a state of affairs that eventually hampered Mr. Romney as he tried to move back to the center). And the debates, filled with gaffes like Texas Gov. Rick Perry forgetting one of the three things he started to list and Mr. Romney making a $10,000 bet with a foe and endorsing “self deportation,” created numerous sound bites that Democrats and Mr. Obama used against Republicans throughout the 2012 campaign.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus — who derided the “slice and dice festival” of 2012 — said the streamlined schedule will change all that.
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“By constructing and instituting a sound debate process, it will allow candidates to bring their ideas and vision to Americans in a timely and efficient way,” he said. “This schedule ensures we will have a robust discussion among our candidates while also allowing the candidates to focus their time engaging with Republican voters. It is exciting that Republicans will have such a large bench of candidates to choose from, and the sanctioned debate process ensures voters will have a chance to gain a chance to hear from them.”
Now, and this is just a thought, the GOP might want to nominate a candidate whose last name isn’t “Romney.”
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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