Rapid City Journal on debates

What is it about debates that makes South Dakota's Democratic candidates for federal office shrink from them like a vampire from a cross? First, the Rapid City Journal notes there will be "No House debate at State Fair" apparently because Herseth backed out citing scheduling concerns. Strangely, despite the fact that there is no House or Senate debate at the State Fair this year, all of the candidates are attending the fair today. The reason there are no debates at the State Fair cannot be blamed on the Republican candidates.

Elsewhere in the pages of the RCJ is a report headlined "Senate candidates spar over debates" that details the behind-the-scenes scrambling and contradictory statements of the Daschle campaign to avoid additional debates. Daschle makes the following comment in the piece:

"We have proposed that of the eight debates we have going, one take place on a reservation," Daschle said. "We've written to sponsors to ask them to consider the option."

Then that statement is contradicted by Dan Pfeiffer, Daschle's deputy campaign manager, who says that while they hadn't yet written to sponsors they were "on the verge" of doing so:

By Friday, Daschle's plan had unraveled, and the Daschle campaign sent no letters to debate sponsors.

"We were on the verge of doing it," Daschle's deputy campaign manager, Dan Pfeiffer, said.

Then Pfeiffer blames KSFY-TV's Mitch Krebs as the culprit for why no letters had been sent to debate sponsors:

The letter was not sent, Pfeiffer said, because Mitch Krebs of KSFY-TV in Sioux Falls told the campaign that the five media outlets had agreed not to move the debates out of the TV studio.

Then Mitch Krebs disputes Pfeiffer's assertion:

Krebs said Steve Hildebrand, Daschle's campaign manager, told him the campaign would prefer to keep the debate in the KSFY studio.

"I never heard anything about moving it to a reservation or anything about a letter going out," Krebs said.

Finally, the RCJ story gets to the nub of the matter: the Daschle campaign thinks there are too many debates as it is:

Daschle and his senior campaign staffers said they are unwilling to add any new debates because they believe eight is enough and a record number in modern South Dakota history.

"We want to do more than just spend time doing debates," said Hildebrand. "We don't have any more room on our schedule to do debates and other things we want to get done. He does a lot of these community dinners and coffees, which provide him with an opportunity to talk directly with voters without the confrontational setting of a structured debate."

As DVT sardonically notes of the whole sordid affair, "if Daschle debated he wouldn't have time for more canned, scripted, managed, and controlled events reciting boilerplate and not taking public questions." Indeed.