That’s right, it’s on the Sunday of a three-day weekend. Like the last two scheduled times, it’s when people are going to be out having fun and enjoying themselves, when people make plans to do active things with their personal lives, not when they’re going to sit passively in front of a screen (or if they are, they’re not-so-passively watching a football game), not when they want to deal with weighty matters. The next prime-time debate isn’t until after the Iowa caucuses.
It would be futile to take seriously Democratic National Committee Chair Wasserman Schultz’s excuses for why she set this schedule, because you know with just one look at the schedule that those reasons are all lies. And that’s before you even get to the late start of the Democratic presidential primary debates relative to the Republicans, the fact that the Republicans are having half again as many, and the DNC’s insidious new rule that any candidates who participate in a debate outside of the official DNC-sanctioned debates will be kicked out of the rest of them.
Clearly a large part of this debate-rigging is the party establishment trying to lock in Hillary Clinton as the nominee. That’s not the end of the story. More generally, it’s also about denying Bernie Sanders a wider audience, not merely because he is competing with Clinton, but because he speaks with moral clarity and reminds everyone what the Democratic Party is supposed to stand for: shared prosperity, justice, peace, liberty, and ultimately democracy, where you have the power. Instead of giving our candidates a prominent chance to showcase what we can do to improve our lot as people of a nation and as humans on Earth, what does Wasserman Schultz say?
What’s more important? Focusing on Republicans or arguing debates?
Don’t try to advocate for ourselves, don’t push for better representation from within, you see, instead just saturate everyone with the Republicans’ ghoulishness, and everything will be grand. I’m sure.
When the likes of Wasserman Schultz denude the Democratic Party of broad, cohesive principles, of lofty ideals, they rob our very lives of meaning. That’s the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you hear about venal political moves like Wasserman Schultz’s debate schedule: it’s the sensation of powerful actors wrenching meaning away from us, of diminishing our civic efforts toward addressing the life-and-death ideas that drive our country.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz should resign from her position as Chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Even as she won’t, though she makes our challenge all the greater, we can invigorate American democracy with our activism anyway—regardless of who the eventual nominee will be.
Please click through for a full, illustrated exposition on the debate debacle, including a rather shocking find featured prominently on the DNC’s website:
Pertinent, though not in the way he meant it (Still-)DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz's vision for the Democratic PartyBy Simplify, Nov 18, 2015
