Remember that scene at the end of The Perfect Storm, when Mark Wahlberg bobs to the surface of a truly mountainous sea, and the camera pans away until he's almost invisible among massive waves? That was what I thought of when the mysteriously still-employed Debbie Wasserman Schultz got up on the stage at the New Hampshire Democratic State Convention and found herself deluged with chants of "More debates!" She came dangerously close to losing the hall entirely.

A couple of times, DWS tried to make the case that "we" should not be fighting amongst "ourselves" and that "we" should concentrate instead on keeping one of the increasingly loopy Republican candidates away from the nuclear codes. Fair enough, but an inadequate response to a legitimate concern that DWS is using every ounce of her barely distinguishable leadership of the Democratic National Committee to monkey with the nominating process to the advantage of her favorite candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton. It is not so much the limited number of debates that got up people's nose. It's that the DNC, led by its chairperson, actually threatened to sanction anyone who wanted to stage a debate, or a "candidate forum," outside of the formal party structure.

"While a six sanctioned debate schedule is consistent with the precedent set by the DNC during the 2004 and 2008 cycles, this year the DNC will further manage the process by implementing an exclusivity requirement," the statement announcing the debates explained. "Any candidate or debate sponsor wishing to participate in DNC debates, must agree to participate exclusively in the DNC-sanctioned process. Any violation would result in forfeiture of the ability to participate in the remainder of the debate process."

This is, quite simply, a crock. If a couple of candidates want to get up on a stage and knock around each other's ideas on Iran, say, or the carried-interest deduction, you're going to blackball them from the formal process? Who the fck are you when you're at home anyway? And this truncated process already is in play in New Hampshire.

"Dartmouth called me a year ago, and I met with them, and the issue was how to get the Democratic party to commit to a debate. And they had wonderful ideas," said Peter Burling, a former DNC member from New Hampshire. "You would have a debate in Hanover, but it would be linked to all parts of the state and it would demonstrate a commitment to our party to the people who are about to cast their first ballot.

"I loved what they were doing. They very much wanted to do it. I guess chairman Wasserman Schultz made the decision that it was going to be a very much more -- what's the word? -- 'restrained' schedule debates. How do you find a broadcast partner, how do you do this, if you're very much sailing against the wind. That's why I very strongly feel that we ought to say, hell, no, we're going to have two more debates here in New Hampshire, we're going to move the one in December forward so it's not a throwaway -- the one in Manchester that's six days before Christmas. It's fine that it's in Manchester but six days before Christmas? Forget about it. What I do think now it's become a clash of wills. I understand the argument that there were maybe too many back in 2010. Now, we need to have more. There's also the fact, from a strictly Democratic perspective, every one of the Democratic candidates will do better if they engage in the Democratic debate forum where they can challenge each other. All of the top three candidates deserve a chance to get out there and really push their ideas."

If HRC were still more of the same kind of runaway favorite that she was when the debate format was scheduled, the DNC's power play might have gone unnoticed. (And, truth be told, polls released on Monday seem to indicate that, while her campaign has taken some dings in the past couple of months, she's still better than odds-on to win the nomination, even if you include Joseph Biden in the model, which you shouldn't do because it's a completely dishonest way to dilute Clinton's numbers.) What's changed, of course, is the sudden and remarkable rise of Senator Bernie Sanders and, more important, the source of that appeal. All due respect to him, Sanders is not doing this on charisma. He is not doing it on money. And he's not doing it on the kind of ratfcking to which we have become accustomed in our elections. In fact, the easiest way to get crossways with Sanders is to offer him a chance to badmouth Clinton. He simply will not play that.

Instead, and this is the startling thing about watching his campaign roll around the country, it's the ideas that have charisma because, at the moment, Sanders is talking almost exclusively about power – the simple raw political power of money, and how that power is exercised to the detriment of the general good. This is not how we talk about power in our politics. Generally, we bury it in euphemism. Or, if we happen to be Republicans produced by the triumph of movement conservatism in that party, we attribute fanciful power to the actual dispossessed – the power of gay people, of the poor, of minorities. To say out loud that power has passed to the plutocrats in a way that it hasn't done so since the last Gilded Age is not polite, even though the evidence that this is the case is all around us, and it's certainly all around everything involved in the current presidential race. This is the real American exceptionalism, says Sanders, and it is killing democracy.

At every stop, and in every stump speech, Sanders begins by flatly admitting that neither he nor anyone else can reverse this dangerous imbalance of power alone.

"Let me also take a moment," he told the New Hampshire convention, "to tell you something that no other candidate for president will tell you, or perhaps ever has told the American people. It is a simple truth, but not widely reported, and that is that no president, not Bernie Sanders, not anybody else, can bring about the enormous changes we need to rebuild our crumbling middle-class, to do all of the things we have to do for the elderly, for the children, for the sick and the poor. No president can do it alone. Unless we have a political revolution, unless tens of millions of Americans are prepared to stand up, to get actively involved in the political process, and make it very, very clear that this great country, and this government, belong to all of us, and not just to a handful of billionaires and campaign contributors."

He says this at every stop. It is not simply a call to action, but it is an implicit criticism of the kind of political apathy that is engendered when the process seems to be nothing but dumbshow and puppetry – Hi, Donald! – while the actual power operates in a sphere beyond democratic controls. It is a stark rebuttal to the notion that democracy can run properly on automatic pilot. A little more than 100 years ago, as the political pushback against the original Gilded Age was gathering steam, Robert J. LaFollette explained the progressive movement:

The essence of the Progressive movement, as I see it, lies in its purpose to uphold the fundamental principles of representative government. It expresses the hopes and desires of millions of common men and women who are willing to fight for their ideals, to take defeat if necessary, and still go on fighting.

Not much really changes, although this time the power of the oligarchy has learned from the lessons of the past while the political opposition does not seem to have done the same kind of homework. It is startling how easily a discussion of political power limits itself to a simple evaluation of polling numbers and the bank accounts of various PAC's and campaigns. The political power of the corporate class is so overwhelming that it is hard to see it whole. If nothing else, Sanders is trying to show how corporate power is connected to voter suppression, to militarized police forces, to income equality and to the basic corruption of the political system. He, at least, is seeing it whole. That is something that is worthy of debates, a lot of debates. Bring them on, Debbie.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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