the first debate with all nine Democratic candidates<\/a>. It’s Saturday night at 9 p.m. and it will be hosted by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos (I know you’ll be glad to hear that, Brian).<\/p>\nThough the candidates have all appeared together at the same event on a couple of occasions, this will be the first “debate.” I put the word in quotes because it will probably lack the flare of a traditional debate. There are nine candidates and the event lasts 90 minutes, including opening and closing remarks from each candidate. With this in mind, we’ll probably be hearing a lot of sound bites and not much in the way of actual exchanges between candidates. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty big deal. <\/p>\n
* Will Dean and Kerry come to blows? (I wouldn’t get between them)
\n* Will Edwards be rewarded for being the only candidate with a Southern accent? (maybe)
\n* Will there be tough questions about the NAACP’s boycott of South Carolina and the state’s use of the Confederate flag? (count on it)
\n* Will Al Sharpton deliver the funniest one-liners? (almost certainly)
\n* Will anyone pay attention to Dennis Kucinich? (who?)<\/p>\n
For those of you who want to watch, it’ll be a little tricky because no national television networks are carrying it live. The event is tomorrow night at 9 pm; it’s starting late to accommodate Sen. Joe Lieberman, who honors Sabbath until sundown Saturday evening. If you’re interested, there will be excerpts on ABC’s This Week program on Sunday morning, and C-SPAN will show the whole thing three times on Sunday — 1 pm, 6:30 pm, and 9:30 pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chances are none of my readers are as obsessed with the Democratic presidential primary to the extent I am, but in case folks are interested, I wanted to remind everyone about this weekend’s big debate. The South Carolina Democratic Party is hosting the first debate with all nine Democratic candidates. It’s Saturday night at 9 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}