The Congressional Black Caucus Institute can’t say it wasn’t warned. Democratic activists and officials implored the CBC Institute not to partner with Fox News for a debate with the Democratic presidential candidates. The CBC Institute struck the deal anyway — assuming that they needed candidates, not activists, to pull off a successful event.
As of today, they have neither.
Late last week, John Edwards, to his credit, announced that he would boycott the debate. Edwards’ deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince said, “[W]e believe there’s just no reason for Democrats to give Fox a platform to advance the right-wing agenda while pretending they’re objective.”
This afternoon, Barack Obama agreed.
Barack Obama has chosen not to attend September’s Democratic presidential primary debate co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Institute and Fox News, an aide said, effectively dooming the event.
Obama is the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus running for President, and his decision allows other candidates to skip the debate without facing criticism that they are turning their backs on a leading black institution.
Friday, John Edwards was the first candidate to announce he’d skip the debate. The CBC Institute is hosting one other debate, with CNN in January, in which all candidates are expected to participate.
“CNN seemed like a more appropriate venue,” the aide said, adding that Obama himself had not called CBC leadership or Fox executives to deliver the news. “It was handled at a staff level.”
The aide said that Obama will participate in the six officially-sanctioned Democratic National Committee debates, whose existence provided candidates a measure of cover to drop out of the Fox-sponsored debate.
(For those of you skeptical about reports from The Politico, ABC News confirms the report.)
Kudos to Edwards for stepping up first, and kudos to Obama for following suit. It’s the right call and sends the right message.
I can only imagine the vitriolic response Fox News is going to deliver. You’ll recall, of course, that FNC Chairman Roger Ailes was livid with John Edwards a month ago, after Edwards was the first candidate to back out of a Nevada debate co-sponsored by the Republicans’ network.
“There’s a long tradition of news organizations, national and local, sometimes together, sponsoring presidential and other candidate debates. The organizations and the panelists have been the objects of a lot of advice and even pressure as to how these debates should be conducted and what questions should be asked. This pressure has been successfully resisted, but it’s being tried again this year with the added wrinkle that candidates are being asked to boycott debates because certain groups wants to approve the sponsoring organizations. This pressure must be resisted as it has been in the past. Any candidate for high office of either party who believes he can blacklist any news organization is making a terrible mistake about journalists.”
And if Fox News were a news organization with journalists in its employ, Ailes might have a point.
It’ll be interesting to see how other candidates respond to Edwards and Obama stepping up like this. Guys like Dodd and Biden are anxious to get exposure and make their case to Democratic voters, so they were unlikely to take the lead on this one. But do they show up anyway, or bolt now that the coast is clear?
Richardson was ready to boycott Fox News’ event in Nevada; will he be the third to thumb his nose at the network?
Hillary Clinton has been fairly quiet on the debate over the Dems and Fox News; will she rush to play catch-up?
Regardless, the Congressional Black Caucus Institute clearly chose the wrong partner, picking a Republican network with a history of racial insensitivities that the CBC knew would put candidates in an awkward position. Now they’re bolting. Good.