Republican presidential campaign aides huddled Sunday night at a suburban Washington hotel to discuss frustration with the televised debates, as the Republican National Committee shuffled its staff to insert more senior oversight into the process, The Washington Times has learned.
The meeting in the Old Town neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia, was called by Republican presidential front-runner Ben Carson, organized by Lindsey Graham’s campaign manager Christian Ferry and featured longtime Republican establishment lawyer Ben Ginsberg as the “facilitator,” according to Mr. Ferry’s email invitation.
The goals were to air “shortcomings of current process,” find areas of agreement, settle on “issues for future debates” and come up with “agreed action items,” Mr. Ferry wrote.
While the campaigns huddled and fallout continued from last week’s CNBC debate, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus reorganized his senior staff and named Sean Cairncross, the party’s chief operating officer and former chief counsel, to take over as lead official for the debates — a role that belonged to senior adviser Sean Spicer.
Mr. Spicer will continue to help organize the debates but will report to Mr. Cairncross. The move gives the RNC a more senior officer, and one with legal experience, to navigate bumpy waters.
Mr. Ginsberg, a former Republican National Committee general counsel, has been despised by many conservatives for his role in getting delegates to the 2012 national convention to adopt rules that made it easier for Mitt Romney to win the nomination.
His role in the meeting Sunday evening only further agitated those conservatives.
“The media love Ben because he is an inside-the-Beltway, moderate, pro-gay-marriage, and they know it. They have been happy to interject him into this because he will steer it to their, and his, benefit,” said Republican lawyer Jim Bopp, a former RNC member from Indiana.
Mr. Bopp led the fight to overturn the Ginsberg rule changes during the 2012 RNC convention.
For the current election cycle, Mr. Ginsberg originally signed on with Scott Walker’s campaign. He had been lined up as the campaign attorney for Ted Cruz’s presidential bid, but that was scuttled when The Times broke the story.
When Mr. Walker suddenly dropped out of the race in September, Mr. Gunsberg was left without a major campaign role.
Earlier this fall, he criticized the way Mr. Priebus agreed with the TV networks to conduct the campaign’s RNC-sanctioned primary debates.
Mr. Priebus pushed back in an email exchange with Mr. Ginsberg.
Mr. Priebus and the networks, each for its own reason, wanted far fewer than the 17 original candidates on stage debating one another at the same time.
The networks decided that 10 was the right number on the same stage, to be determined by how well they were polling. Candidates who fell below a certain percentage in the polls would be relegated to a non-prime-time debate with other low-polling candidates.
From the outset, Mr. Graham has scored too low in national polls to win a spot on the main stage of the three debates.
In an email dated Oct. 31, Mr. Ferry invited each of the 15 Republican presidential nomination campaign organizations to send no more than two representatives to the meeting at the Hilton Hotel on King Street.
However, Mr. Ferry said in an email to The Washington Times that he “did not send an email to all 15 campaigns inviting them to attend the meeting and did not make the sole decision to include Ben Ginsberg. Everything that led up to the meeting was a cooperative effort spearheaded by the [Ben] Carson, [Bobby] Jindal and Graham campaigns.”
After the meeting, Barry Bennett, Mr. Carson’s campaign manager, told The Associated Press that he was amazed by “how friendly the meeting was” and said the campaign teams agreed to have more.
He also held out the threat of a candidate boycott if the networks did not agree to the campaigns’ demands.
“The only leverage we have is to not come,” he said.
However, another of the participants contradicted those reports to The Washington Times.
“It is not fair to say the campigns agreed to cut the RNC out of the debate process,” said Steve Munisteri, a senior adviser to the Rand Paul campaign. “The opposite is true. The campaigns collectively will negotiate directly by conference call with the networks on format, but the RNC will continue to preside over the logistics and, if the RNC and networks are willing, the RNC will decide the criteria for who is included in the prime-time debates.”
Mr. Munisteri said the represented campaigns agreed they want the RNC to continue to be the sole entity that sanctions each debate with the penalty that candidates who participate in unsanctioned debates will be barred for future sanctioned debates.
The Carson and Donald Trump representatives prevailed in their desire to limit every debate to two hours, with the understanding that the two candidates would refuse to show up for debates scheduled to last longer.
Attempts by representatives at the meeting to reach Mr. Priebus by phone during the meeting were unsuccessful.
What opened the door for Mr. Ferry’s meeting was Mr. Priebus’ decision to suspend NBC’s involvement in a scheduled February debate after the company’s CNBC network failed to live up to the agreement made with the RNC regarding the respect the candidates would be accorded in the debate in Boulder, Colorado.
The Republican campaigns ended the debate in an uproar, some blaming both the networks and the RNC.
The Sunday meeting was to include discussion of several options to improve the debate procedure.
One possibility is for the candidates to hold their own debates, with their own rules, and with their own chosen moderators.
The networks would be free to cover these debates the way they cover NFL games, said Mr. Munisteri, a former Texas Republican Party chairman.
“We want good debates with equal time and opening and closing statements,” said Doug Stafford, Mr. Paul’s chief strategist. “We want moderators who don’t attack and argue with our candidates. And we want to work together with others and RNC to use the leverage we have as one of the highest-rated programs out there right now.”
Mr. Spicer said neither he nor Mr. Priebus had anything to do with Mr. Ginsberg’s role in the Sunday meeting.
“I have read that Ben Ginsberg is going to the meeting — not sure who asked him, but he is not associated with the RNC,” Mr. Spicer told The Times.
• Ralph Z. Hallow can be reached at rhallow@gmail.com.
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