Among the qualities that make for a good leader are resilience, courage and a determination to follow through on commitments, even when doing so takes some effort. Portland mayoral candidates Jules Bailey and Ted Wheeler came up short in all three areas this weekend. Having committed weeks ago to a debate Monday night, both pulled out Sunday evening when, for security reasons, The Oregonian/OregonLive determined that it would be more prudent to hold the event without a live audience.

The debate was to have taken place at Revolution Hall in Portland. It was to have lasted one hour, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. More than 1,000 people had registered to attend the event at no cost, and an audience many times that size would have had been able to watch online. The event was to have been live streamed on OregonLive.com.

As the event approached, however, credible threats of disruption mounted, including some that suggested a potential risk to public safety.

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Editorial Agenda 2016



Get Oregon centered

Better leadership in education

Make Portland a city that works

Build Oregon prosperity

Protect and expand personal freedom

Get pot right

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While 12 candidates had filed to run for mayor, we invited only Bailey and Wheeler, whose qualifications for the office exceed by a wide margin those of any other candidate. One of these two is almost certain to be Portland's next mayor. Our decision understandably frustrated some of the other candidates. Lacking a rational and defensible basis for choosing among the other 10 for inclusion in the event, however, we determined that Portland's voters would be served best by a substantive debate among the race's two front-runners.

Not everyone agreed with this approach. Some of the other candidates weren't happy about it, and some intimated that they would attend the debate and, perhaps, disrupt it. As if to underscore the potential for disruption, a protester took the stage at a debate last week involving Wheeler, Bailey and Sarah Iannarone. The protester demanded that other candidates be allowed to join the discussion.

More serious threats of disruption appeared, including an organized effort aimed at preventing the debate from happening. One email circulated by protesters even suggested that the doors to the venue be locked from the outside with bicycle-type U-locks in order to keep the audience from entering. The risk of such an action to anyone trapped inside the venue is obvious. We could not ignore it.

The Oregonian/OregonLive decided on Sunday that it would be prudent to hold the debate without a live audience. The event would have operated more like a televised studio debate, making disruption much more difficult. The candidates, meanwhile, would have been able to discuss their visions for Portland without distraction. This certainly would have inconvenienced people who'd registered to attend the debate live, but the much larger audience watching via live stream would not have been affected. Anyone who wanted would have been able to watch the debate to which Bailey and Wheeler had committed.

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But when we approached the two campaigns with our alternative - hold the same debate, but without a live audience - both said "no" and gave different variations of the same explanation: Eliminating the live audience would change the feel of the event in a way neither campaign was willing to tolerate. One campaign staffer even likened the alternative to transmitting from a bunker.

Would holding the debate without a live audience have required some small adjustments on the candidates' parts? Of course it would, but the difficulty of making such adjustments would not have been on the order of, say, climbing Mount Everest. We were certainly willing to make it work, and a pair of candidates who truly wanted to follow through on their commitment to voters - to hold a substantive debate - would have done so as well. These are, after all, experienced politicians, and they'd been preparing for a debate Monday in any case. Their eagerness to pull out suggests, rather, that they were looking for the slightest excuse to cancel their involvement in what had become a controversial event. That opportunity came in the form of our decision not to proceed with a live audience.

Portland voters have reason to be disappointed today. They were expecting - and they were promised - a debate Monday night. That debate will not happen. But let's make one thing clear: The Oregonian/OregonLive canceled the live audience - and for good reason. Jules Bailey and Ted Wheeler canceled the debate.