Massa’s Debate Challenge to Kuhl is Accepted
This is big news, the biggest news we’ve reported in the brief history of this blog (with all due respect to optimusprime’s one man protest): Randy Kuhl has accepted Eric Massa’s longstanding challenge to debate. While the details remain open, the Massa campaign is hoping for a series of 8 debates (one in each of the 8 counties that comprise the 29th district), two of which will be televised.
Two thoughts occur to me about this:
- Those internal polls the Kuhl campaign saw must have been even worse than I thought. It’s surprising that they accepted this challenge so early, unless they saw something in the dynamics of the race that really scared them
- Good for them for accepting anyway — provided that they agree to a full slate of debates, at least some of which are televised. Right now, the Kuhl campaign has only consented to “participate in a radio debate to be aired on WLEA radio in Hornell.” That sounds distressingly like a single, non-televised debate to me.
But maybe I’m being too cynical here. It’s terrific that the Kuhl campaign is agreeing to debate Massa at all. H. L. Mencken once said “The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.” One debate isn’t enough “more democracy” in my book, but I suppose it’s better than no more democracy at all. Still, the way I see it, 8 debates means 8 times as much more democracy.
Related posts:
I agree that this is very interesting news, but it is hard to parse the details. Incumbents agressively demanding debates (which is how today’s D&C article is written) are always in a weak position. That’s certainly the most important message in the story. But, using only a tiny radio station is strange. Maybe Kuhl’s polling shows that he’s weaker than expected there and they want to see how a dose of Randy goes over in that part of the district. Or maybe Kuhl wants to get a debate out of the way in order to say that he did it so he can’t be accused of ducking debates later in the campaign. Another possibility: Kuhl’s not confident in his debating skills and wants to a test-drive in a place where losing does the least damage.