The GOP's debate over debates

The staff of The World and Everything in It has profiled 22 possible 2016 presidential candidates in its “White House Wednesday” series. Now they take a look at who’s ahead and who’s making moves as the primaries get closer.

The next GOP presidential debate is only six days away, but the aftershocks from last week’s presidential debate continue to rattle the race. What many Republicans consider a disastrous primetime contest on CNBC could reshape future GOP debates.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) and the candidates themselves felt the network’s moderators were overly combative and even condescending at times. It started with this question posed to Donald Trump by CNBC’s John Harwood: “Let’s be honest, is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?”

Beyond the tone of the moderators’ questions, the RNC said the network broke a number of promises to the party. CNBC promised to focus the debate on economic issues, but the moderators asked questions about social issues such as candidates’ views on homosexuality.

Fox Business network and The Wall Street Journal will host next week’s debate. Though the candidates don’t seem too worried about being treated unfairly in that one, they are pretty upset with the process overall to this point. Their dissatisfaction echoes complaints from the 2012 campaign cycle, after which the RNC set out to change the debate process. It greatly reduced the number of debates and spread them out more geographically.

The RNC’s other goal, to involve conservative media more in the debates, is still a work in progress. The CNN debate last month was co-sponsored by the Salem Media Group, and conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt was able to ask some questions of the candidates.

The debate coming up in February was supposed to be sponsored in part by NBC and Telemundo, but those networks’ involvement has been put on hold. The conservative magazine National Review is still co-sponsoring that debate. But after last week, in the minds of some candidates, that’s not enough.

Ben Carson’s campaign recommended cutting the networks out altogether and instead just streaming the debates online. Others have called for only conservative moderators as hosts. Representatives from at least a dozen Republican campaigns huddled over the weekend without the RNC to talk about possible changes, perhaps even presenting their demands directly to the networks and cutting out the party altogether. But getting all of the campaigns on the same page is proving difficult.

Ben Carson’s campaign manager, Barry Bennett, called the meeting, and the representatives drafted a letter to the networks requesting earlier advance notice about the format and the rules of each debate. Some of the GOP campaigns, including Trump’s, have said they won’t sign the letter.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus did appoint a new chief negotiator to handle the details of the debates with the networks and to send the message that the GOP won’t tolerate a repeat performance of what happened last week.

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