Democrat suggests more debates…and promptly gets disinvited from attending one
Posted on October 12, 2015 by Ben Bullard
As bad as the infighting in the Republican Party can be, the establishment control freaks inside the Democratic Party may have the GOP’s leash-holders beat.
Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii found that out the hard way Sunday, when she informed the press that the Democratic National Committee had locked her out of attending Tuesday’s Democratic presidential primary debate.
What was Gabbard’s offense? Going on TV and suggesting that the Democratic Party expand its paltry debate schedule, which critics (including some Democratic candidates) say amounts to an attempt by the party establishment to protect Hillary Clinton’s candidacy from unnecessary damage and exposure.
From The New York Times Monday:
Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said she was disinvited from the first Democratic presidential primary debate in Nevada after she appeared on television and called for more face-offs.
Ms. Gabbard confirmed on Sunday that her chief of staff received a message last Tuesday from the chief of staff to Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the national committee, about her attendance at the debate. A day earlier, Ms. Gabbard had appeared on MSNBC and said there should be an increase beyond the current six sanctioned debates.
The DNC said Gabbard wasn’t “disinvited,” but Gabbard is having none of it. “When I signed up to be vice chair of the D.N.C., no one told me I would be relinquishing my freedom of speech and checking it at the door,” she told the Times.
“…This isn’t about any one person. It’s about how the Democratic Party should be representing democratic values, allowing for free speech and open debate within our party, and for more transparency and debates for our presidential candidates.
“All of our candidates agree with my position.”
Well, maybe all of them except Hillary Clinton.
The infighting may be symptomatic of a Democratic establishment that’s even more entrenched than that of the GOP in protecting entrenched interests. In the Democrats’ case, that means abandoning the big-tent moderation of years past in favor of capturing far-left special interests votes of every stripe. It hasn’t worked at the state level, but the establishment continues to drift to the left in an effort to bring out progressive voters for national elections.
“[A] paper on polarization and inequality released in August by political scientists from Princeton, Georgetown, and the University of Oregon…provides some empirical evidence that Democratic Party’s leftward drift is more pronounced than the GOP’s rightward drift, at least at the state level,” The American Interest recently observed.
“… As the Democratic Party lost power at the state level over the past 15 years, it also effectively shed its moderate wing. Centrist Democrats have increasingly lost seats to Republicans, ‘resulting in a more liberal Democratic party’ overall. The authors find that the ideological median of Republican legislators has shifted much less.”
That’s probably because the GOP doesn’t have to stoop quite as low to catch opportunistic voters as does the Democratic Party, whose national messaging has grown ever more shrill and alarmist.
As if on cue, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz got on CNN Sunday to explain how Democrats and Republicans differ: Democrats don’t want to kick all the women out of the country, but Republicans do.
“The Republicans are trying to out-right wing each other,” Schultz told CNN’s Dana Bash. “Look, between the fifteen Republican candidates who are left — all of whom are trying to out-Trump Donald Trump — by saying, ‘Yeah let’s kick women. Let’s kick them and immigrants out of this country. Let’s take away health care from women.'”
Schultz went on to say that the next president will most certainly be a Democrat, “because of that contrast” between far-right Republicans and the absurd, far-left drift in her own party.
http://personalliberty.com/democrat-suggests-more-debatesand-promptly-gets-disinvited-from-attending-one/
