AP Photo Clinton, DNC face pressure to add debates

The increasingly public rift between Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and others in her party’s leadership over the number of presidential debates is threatening to become more than just embarrassing to the DNC.

It’s spelling trouble for Hillary Clinton, the faltering front-runner who can’t afford to look like she’s being protected by party insiders, say Democrats aligned with both the DNC and 2016 campaigns.


On one side of the fight is a pair of party vice chairs and 2016 candidate Martin O’Malley, who have complained in recent weeks that the DNC should sponsor more than its six planned debates – only four of which will take place before voting in Iowa -- and have protested the committee’s vow to punish candidates who try to participate in unsanctioned events.

On the other side is Wasserman Schultz, who steadfastly insists she won’t budge from the plan, which was carefully negotiated with the campaigns this spring — part of a process that included convincing the Clinton camp to agree to so many debates in the first place.

“There has been discussion between the officers of the DNC and the chairwoman, [but] she’s made her decision and her position clear,” said DNC vice chair Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii congresswoman who — along with former Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak, another vice chair — is calling for more debates.

With the fault lines drawn, many Democrats believe that it would take nothing less than a direct call from Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn — or the White House — to change Wasserman Schultz’s mind.

And that, they say, reflects poorly on Clinton — who now maintains she would be open to more debates, but whose reluctance to press the issue with Wasserman Schultz appears to reflect her true intentions.

“I think every Democratic campaign and the DNC should have to explain why we are ceding the discussion and attention to the Republicans by refusing to the kind of robust debate schedule we've always had,” said O’Malley’s campaign manager Dave Hamrick in a statement to POLITICO. “The question remains -- if the DNC is still holding to their unprecedented exclusivity clause, are they doing it at the Clinton campaign's request?"

Clinton’s position is delicate, said a handful of Democrats. If the debate complaints were to grow louder or if her prime rival Bernie Sanders were to push the issue more aggressively, Clinton would find herself under even greater pressure to use her leverage with Wasserman Schultz to allow for more debates.

Wasserman Schultz is widely viewed as closer to Clinton than to other candidates or to President Barack Obama, and the Clinton campaign was the first to sign a joint fundraising agreement with the party committee.

And if Wasserman Schultz wants to keep her job after Democrats name their nominee, “she’s got to keep the Clinton people happy,” said one DNC veteran, operating under the widely held assumption that Clinton will eventually win the nomination.

As a result, some Sanders and O’Malley supporters have claimed that the DNC chose its debate plan with an eye toward helping Clinton. At the DNC’s summer meeting in Minneapolis, O’Malley declared that the debate schedule was “rigged” in favor of Clinton. (A Clinton campaign spokeswoman declined to comment for this story.)

For now, the Clinton campaign remains in favor of keeping the number of debates low, say people familiar with Brooklyn’s thinking, to avoid squandering her advantage as the best-known Democrat in the race — and to limit the opportunities for her rivals to rattle her on television.

But Clinton’s position might change if the campaign of Sanders – far ahead of O'Malley in the polls – were to push the matter.

The Vermonter’s team is instead focusing on cooperating with the DNC while its candidate edges past Clinton in both New Hampshire and Iowa.

“When you get into these political debates about debates, you stop communicating about issues that affect the lives of people, and you begin to communicate about things that people in Washington obsess about,” explained Tad Devine, Sanders’ top strategist. “It’s nothing against O’Malley. We join him in calling for more debates. That’s our position. But are we going to have a sit-down in the DNC lobby? No."

For his part, O’Malley – who is trailing both Clinton and Sanders by a huge margin – took the unusual step of railing against the party leadership on stage at the DNC summer meeting in Minnesota, just a few feet away from an annoyed Wasserman Schultz. He gained some crucial support last Wednesday when Gabbard and Rybak put out a statement urging more debates.

Gabbard and Rybak had made the case for more debates directly to both Wasserman Schultz and the other vice chairs, according to Gabbard. But when it became clear that the chairwoman was not going to budge, Gabbard said, they moved forward with the statement, posted to Gabbard's Facebook wall.

Wasserman Schultz told others that she had not known that Gabbard and Rybak were prepared to go public, said one DNC operative, which served to heighten tensions within the DNC. But the whole drama has only toughened Wasserman Schultz’s resolve not to change the plan, according to DNC insiders.

Hamrick, O'Malley's campaign manager, will be part of a protest outside the DNC on Wednesday. He has asked all his counterparts on other campaigns to join in his call for more debates.

The DNC, for its part, is now on its third debate liaison to the campaigns this cycle after communications director Mo Elleithee left the committee in June. Former White House communications director Anita Dunn then took the debate role from him, before handing it off to former Obama strategist Erik Smith in late July.

Yet so far, the issue has yet to resonate on the campaign trail.

Less than a quarter of New Hampshire Democrats said they believed the party leadership was limiting the number of debates to help Clinton, according to a new Monmouth poll of the Granite State out on Tuesday. And a prominent swing-state DNC member said any talk of a nationwide conversation about the debates following O’Malley's speech was overblown.

“There’s not a hue and cry for more debates,” he said. “Martin did his thing and he’s trailing, so that’s what he needed to do to get some attention … I have not heard neither hide nor hair since Minneapolis."

Meanwhile, a pair of prominent New Hampshire DNC members aligned with Clinton similarly insisted they have heard no discussion of the issue among average voters the state, where a handful of prominent Democrats had signed a letter urging the DNC to add more debates before Gabbard and Rybak’s post.

“No one’s asked me to get involved in it,” said longtime Clinton ally Bill Shaheen.

“I haven’t heard anything from other DNC members, and this is something the membership doesn’t have any control over,” added former New Hampshire party chairwoman Kathy Sullivan.

So for the time being, said the swing state official, the conversation is stuck in Washington, much to Clinton’s relief.

“It’s got this inside baseball feel, deep in the dugout,” he said. “It’s more about bruised feelings — a ‘you didn’t include me in the discussion’ deal — than a philosophical conversation about whether we should have more debates."