James Taranto: McCain's gambit to change debate rules
John McCain's campaign on Wednesday made two drastic departures from the rules that have traditionally governed presidential campaigns. The first is the one everyone has been talking about: his decision to call tonight's debate with Barack Obama into question. McCain announced this morning that he will attend the debate; Politico has a report and McCain's statement. But even the threat of nonparticipation was highly unusual. In every campaign since 1984, once the campaigns have negotiated the terms of the debates, they have gone on as planned.
Debates between the candidates are a fairly new tradition in presidential campaigns. There were none before 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon held four of them. They resumed in 1976 and have happened every four years since.
There is one precedent for a candidate balking at a debate: President Jimmy Carter's refusal to participate in a debate scheduled for Sept. 21, 1980. The League of Women Voters, which then sponsored presidential debates, had invited Rep. John Anderson, a liberal Republican running as an independent, to participate, on the ground that he met the league's threshold of attracting 15% in opinion polls. Carter said he would debate only one-on-one with Republican nominee Ronald Reagan. The league stood its ground and held the debate without Carter. The result, the Reagan-Anderson debate, is an odd footnote in American political history.
Podcast
James Taranto discusses McCain's debate gambit.
Carter and Reagan did debate, on Oct. 28, 1980, after Anderson's poll numbers had fallen below the 15% threshold. It is widely thought that the debate helped Reagan by reassuring voters that he was not the trigger-happy nut of liberal caricature. But it's hard to argue that Carter helped himself by ducking the first debate.
Since then, opposing candidates have sometimes clashed in advance over debate terms--most notably in 1992, when George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were still negotiating at the start of October. And the candidates have asserted more control over the debate format, so that in 1988 the League of Women Voters got out of the debate business, giving way to the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.
McCain's Wednesday announcement makes him the first candidate since Carter to attempt to change the terms of a debate after they have been negotiated. Obama seems to have won this scuffle: The debate goes on, as he had demanded, and Congress has not yet agreed on legislation to deal with the financial crisis--the emergency that prompted McCain to suspend the campaign and seek postponement of the debate....
Read entire article at WSJ
Debates between the candidates are a fairly new tradition in presidential campaigns. There were none before 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon held four of them. They resumed in 1976 and have happened every four years since.
There is one precedent for a candidate balking at a debate: President Jimmy Carter's refusal to participate in a debate scheduled for Sept. 21, 1980. The League of Women Voters, which then sponsored presidential debates, had invited Rep. John Anderson, a liberal Republican running as an independent, to participate, on the ground that he met the league's threshold of attracting 15% in opinion polls. Carter said he would debate only one-on-one with Republican nominee Ronald Reagan. The league stood its ground and held the debate without Carter. The result, the Reagan-Anderson debate, is an odd footnote in American political history.
Podcast
James Taranto discusses McCain's debate gambit.
Carter and Reagan did debate, on Oct. 28, 1980, after Anderson's poll numbers had fallen below the 15% threshold. It is widely thought that the debate helped Reagan by reassuring voters that he was not the trigger-happy nut of liberal caricature. But it's hard to argue that Carter helped himself by ducking the first debate.
Since then, opposing candidates have sometimes clashed in advance over debate terms--most notably in 1992, when George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were still negotiating at the start of October. And the candidates have asserted more control over the debate format, so that in 1988 the League of Women Voters got out of the debate business, giving way to the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.
McCain's Wednesday announcement makes him the first candidate since Carter to attempt to change the terms of a debate after they have been negotiated. Obama seems to have won this scuffle: The debate goes on, as he had demanded, and Congress has not yet agreed on legislation to deal with the financial crisis--the emergency that prompted McCain to suspend the campaign and seek postponement of the debate....