The Daily Background

Oh boy. Worst response ever:

“So he’ll meet with dictators but not the black caucus or seniors in Iowa?”

That was a “source close to the Clinton campaign” commenting on Obama’s decision not to participate in special interest non-DNC sanctioned debates from now until January.

The “source” couldn’t be more wrong. Obama’s decision was a decision to spend more time doing retail politics in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and other states, instead of traveling and preparing for an endless series of debates and forums. It was about doing less television events and more hand-shaking and one on one campaigning. He’ll meet one hell of a lot more seniors in Iowa by devoting his time to meeting seniors in Iowa than he would have if he was flying off to do another debate across the country every other day.

Now, on the Congressional Black Caucus question. Obama had decided not to participate in the CBC/Fox News debate, saying he was going to participate the CBC one in January instead. When I first heard the news that Obama would be sticking to only the DNC debates, I immediately wondered if he would be skipping the CBC debate as a result of this.

So, I got in touch with the indispensable Marc Ambinder, the reporter who had first reported Obama’s decision, and he told me that he was under the impression that Obama would still attend the CBC debate, and now TIME provides us verification: “The Obama campaign points out that they WILL be doing the CBC debate, as it fails outside the “sanctioning” period, in January.”

Finally, it’s worth noting, as Ambinder does, that “Obama has already spoken at 19 different candidate forums and has participated in seven full debates and is committed to attending a total of fifteen debates.” At some point you have to decide whether or not your time is best spent putting on makeup for television debates or meeting actual voters in the early primary states.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog