At the beginning of the 2016 primary season, there was much ado about the Democratic debate schedule. Sanders and O'Malley supporters complained that the limited number of debates, frequently placed on nights when no one would be watching, was catering to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. For Sen. Sanders, it was an attempt by the Democratic establishment to keep Hillary from stumbling by not allowing her to talk too much. For O'Malley, it was clearly an attempt to keep his struggling campaign in the dark so it would prevent no challenge to her.
But it's April now, and we're winding up to the New York primary on April 19 — so debates, which have begun to trail off as we get deeper into election season, are back in the news. Clinton and Sanders are both furious, for different reasons, and are fighting about the date and location of a debate this month.
There's an easy solution to this. Don't hold the debate in Bernie's home turf of Brooklyn. Also don't hold a debate in Hillary's preferred location in Pennsylvania. In fact, just don't hold a debate at all.
Why bother? We never learn anything new about the candidates at Democratic debates. For the Republicans, it might have made sense to have such an ungodly number of debates, since there were so many candidates until recently that it was hard to get to all of their positions on all of the issues onstage in a two- or three-hour debate. But for the Democrats, who have been only a few candidates since the very beginning, we are running out of issues to discuss.
Oh, there are certainly things they should have been asked that no one has mentioned. For example, the debates haven't yet touched significantly on reproductive health. But that's not something you can base an entire debate around.
The debates are boring. There is a pattern which repeats itself every time the DNC decides to hold one — Bernie turns every question into a commentary on economic inequality or campaign finance, and Hillary skillfully dodges answering questions she doesn't want to answer and provides well-thought-out, solidly-researched answers to the ones she does. Then the internet declares Bernie the winner while the critics sit back and wonder why no one is listening to them.
We know the differences between the candidates by now. Listening to Bernie's repetitive stump speech and Hillary's focus-group pandering in a new city isn't going to change enough votes for the hours of listening to them argue to be worth it.