Kucinich Not Included in Saturday's ABC News Debate
According to press reports, my favorite candidate for the Democratic nomination for President, Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, will not be allowed to participate in Saturday's debate sponsored by ABC News.
As it turns out, only four Democrats -- Sen. Barack Obama, Sen. Hillary Clinton, former Sen. John Edwards and former Gov. Bill Richardson -- will appear on that stage. This effectively mandates that Democratic voters will not be allowed to hear the views of Kucinich or of Mike Gravel. Chris Dodd and Joe Biden dropped out of the race after Iowa, saving ABC the embarrassment of having to bar them from this debate as well.
The Kucinich campaign immediately filed an emergency petition with the FCC charging ABC was violating its fundamental requirement to operate in the public interest. After pointing out that Kucinich had been effectively choked out of Iowa by that state's Democratic Party machine and that he has considerable resources on the ground and support in New Hampshire, the complaint went on: "In addition, Complainant Kucinich has been the winner in national online polls conducted by Democracy for America (receiving almost 50,000 votes while the closest competitor only received 38,000), Virginia State Democratic Party (receiving 30% of the Democratic vote while the closest competitor received 27%), Independent Voters (75% of the Democratic vote out of 80,000 online voters), as well as polls by Progressive Democrats of America and the Nation. In an ABC News poll, Complainant Kucinich received the most support from 42,487 voters (garnering 35% of the vote to 22% for the next closest candidate) who were asked who won the Democratic presidential primary debate on August 19, 2007."
ABC says it established cutoff criteria for the debate to enable the conversation to become more focused and allow candidates more time to discuss issues more deeply. Their criterion was that a candidate had to end up in the top 4 in Iowa, pull 5% of the vote in Iowa, or poll at 5% in the most recent of one or more of four national polls. I find those critera far too narrow, but ABC News said that all candidates were made aware of these criteria well in advance and nobody objected. If that's true -- and with the mainstream media poisoning the well against any candidate they don't understand or like, that's not cleaer -- then Dennis and his team have little room to complain.
If, on the other hand, as I suspect, ABC News did not get candidate buy-in on this unique and unprecedented set of criteria to qualify a candidate for inclusion in a partisan debate on the issues, then it has committed a grievous error. No media outlet should be able to tell members of a given political party which of its candidates should be able to be heard before a nominee has been chosen. Such action might find some justification in the General Election but not during primary season.
