Debate Analysis

This whole blowup between the Hackett and Carney camps over the debate schedule is relatively fascinating.

It seemed pretty obvious from the beginning that Carney wasn't into debating Hackett. Even early last month after Hackett proposed his format for eight debates, the October 30th debate was already scheduled and the Carney campaign seemed lukewarm at best towards the notion of entertaining more debates. Carney spokeswoman Rebbecca Gale even addressed Hackett like a little child saying, "If he’d behave himself, perhaps we’d discuss more debates."

Then, the Hackett campaign essentially tried to smoke Carney out from hiding. They seemed to believe calling him a liberal debate dodger enough times would force Carney above ground. While that did keep the debate issue simmering, I'm sure at the end of the day there wasn't enough of an incentive for Carney to accommodate the added political risk.

There should be more debates between these two candidates, but I think at the end of the day the reason we are not seeing more between the two candidates is because the debate schedule became a campaign issue rather than a scheduling formality.

After the initial challenge to eight debates, Hackett began beating this issue like a drum (see here, here, and here). It seemed to be one area where the Hackett campaign thought they got some traction. There was even a big campaign point made about Carney possibly agreeing to a second debate and a sense of vindication emerged which drove the issue further into political territory.

It could be a matter of micro-analyzing the situation, but allowing Hackett to have more debates could have been viewed in the Carney camp as handing him an early political victory (not to mention the needed publicity it could have given Hackett). Yesterday's reaction by Mark Harris essentially proved how important the issue was to the campaign.

One thing that is for certain, we haven't heard the last from the Hackett campaign regarding Chris Carney's failure to defend his record in public debates.