The entire slate of televised debates that were to be held has been scrapped. As I mentioned before, the League of Women Voters were arranging these debates in conjunction with the local cable company, Cox Communications. I understand the Democratic candidates were willing to tape but that the Republican candidates were not, even when given a number of different dates to choose from.
The official explanation that is being offered is that the LWV got started late on putting this together and there simply are too many candidate forums and debates already on the schedule. To some extent, I’ll buy this. It seems that every group out there wants to host a candidate debate – and they all want to do it in October. I ran into that problem – I seem to recall one week where we had a different forum every night, with two scheduled on one night. (I wish there were some big calendar in the sky so that groups could see what other groups have scheduled.)
Another, related issue, is that sometimes the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. At the same time one LWV group was trying to arrange the televised debates, another group was trying to get candidates to come to the regular meetings. This led, no doubt, to some confusion on the part of the candidates, something I realized when HMR left this comment:
I was at HQ when the three were laid out; no way he was going to be able to schedule all three.
When HMR referred to “the three,” I realized he was talking about the three unit meetings that are held in Norfolk, not the televised debates. But I only knew that because I am a League member. It would have been nice had there been some coordination here.
Even so, I’m not willing to let the candidates off that easily. The League started early enough to schedule these tapings – not live, mind you – that they should have been able to get them done. Given what has happened in Loudoun [1, 2] it seems there is a concerted effort to avoid the debates.
I find that disappointing.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
I agree Vivian. The open forum and the debate are the best (if not oldest and therefore traditional) ways for the public to get a feel on the candidates. These days it is too easy for a politican to hide behind the party platform and keep the public in the dark as to what their position(s) are. I think we saw the result of that line of thinking last winter when our delegates couldn’t decide how to handle the public transportation issue. They should have been held accountable before they won their seats.