When Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, defended her skewed debate schedule for the 2016 election’s Democratic presidential primaries, her rationale was pretty hard to swallow.

“It’s labor intensive to prepare for a debate,” Wasserman Schultz said at a media event on Thursday. She explained that “a responsible candidate comes off the road, has to devote staff and personal resources to getting prepared … It’s important that we keep candidates with a schedule that allows them to really engage in [the primary campaign] process.”

The debate schedule is extremely sparse, with six planned debates compared with more than 20 debates and forums in the packed primary season leading up to the ‘08 election. That’s a pretty drastic drop.

By what hackneyed logic is Schultz downplaying the significance of the debates to the contest? Such a limited schedule unfairly denies the pool of Democratic candidates visibility and the opportunity to become better defined in the public eye.

In Schultz’s view, none of the candidates can afford to be distracted from the repetitive speeches, dinners and baby-kissing fluff that usually litter the campaign trail, which are all apparently more important to the contest than having a fair number of debates.

We’re talking about internationally televised debates that provide a supremely visible platform for the actual platforms of presidential hopefuls. In the age of media, it’s the most influential proving ground for primary candidates. Anyone who wants to be president should be able to strongly defend their convictions on a televised stage before millions of voters who didn’t hock it out to the trail.

With this primary shaping up to be possibly the most monumental contest for the fate of the party arguably in decades, candidates shouldn’t be getting less visibility than in previous elections.

There also doesn’t seem to be much of a reason for the first Democratic debate to be delayed until an entire month from now. The Republican circus has already staged two performances, with another one coming up within the week.

The move, which has been roundly criticized by a number of Democrats within the DNC and out, feels like an attempt to control the battle by Schultz. She openly gushed about Hillary Clinton’s qualifications for The Big Job in April, and didn’t even seem 100 percent sure there would even be a fight for the nomination. As if Queen Clinton would just finish her royal tour of the primary trail with a coronation instead of a nomination.

If we assume that Schultz is in Clinton’s corner, which she appears to be, the move smacks of cold political calculation. Clinton stands to benefit most from a lack of publicity right now, with her lagging campaign and the inauthentic, suit-stuffed-with-cash feel of her rhetoric.

While I suppose I should thank Schultz for keeping Clinton’s artificial persona off the television for a little longer, this debate schedule isn’t fair to voters, who deserve a more fleshed-out and balanced contest.

It’s an almost obvious attempt to rig the competition, to let Clinton get her act together and hope that Bernie Sanders’ accelerating campaign loses steam before Oct. 13. Sanders and fellow Democratic candidate Martin O’Malley have leveled such criticisms at the DNC, calling for more debates.

But as the DNC’s exclusivity rule bars candidates from participating in any other debates, they don’t have much of a choice but to pressure the DNC to level the playing field.

Thomas Beckley-Forest is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at tjbeckle@syr.edu.

Published on September 14, 2015 at 5:40 pm