Cantwell, McGavick to debate

After more than a week of negotiations and a claim by challenger Mike McGavick that incumbent Maria Cantwell was “short-changing” Eastern Washington on debates, the major party candidates for the U.S. Senate apparently have nailed down two debates and another joint appearance in the coming weeks.

An hour-long debate in Seattle and a half-hour debate in Spokane will be taped for later broadcast, and an hour-long joint interview of the two candidates by The Spokesman-Review editorial board will be Webcast live and available for viewing through the election.

The Spokane debate, sponsored by the Downtown Rotary with cooperation from KXLY-TV and the newspaper, will be Oct. 12 at the Spokane Club. The 30-minute length was initially proposed by the Rotary Club, which sponsors many candidate debates during luncheons in the fall.

It was the venue for one of only two debates in 2000, when Cantwell beat incumbent Sen. Slade Gorton, McGavick’s former boss, in a close election. The other debate that year was also in Seattle.

The McGavick campaign agreed with a request by KXLY to extend the time to an hour, but the Cantwell campaign refused. That prompted McGavick, who has called for as many as nine debates – one in each congressional district – to contend Eastern Washington was being short-changed by getting half the time that Seattle gets.

“Just a half hour is ridiculous,” he said Thursday. “It’s shocking that the incumbent is so unwilling to have open, public debates.”

Joining McGavick were news media outlets that had proposed debates and been rejected. The Daily Olympian wondered on its editorial page “What is Maria afraid of?” and the Yakima Herald-Republic on its editorial page called the limited number of locales “unacceptable.”

“Central Washington, a rather sizable and important part of the state (at least from our point of view) is left out again,” the paper wrote Wednesday.

Michael Meehan, chief strategist of the Cantwell campaign said the format was established by the Rotary, not the campaigns.

“The Rotary ran an excellent debate (in 2000), and we look forward to being their guest again,” he said. “We believe it’s important to have a civic organization sponsor a debate.”

After the Rotary debate, the candidates will walk across the street to The Spokesman-Review building, where they will be questioned by the newspaper’s editorial board in a session that can be viewed on a computer with Internet access to the newspaper’s Web site, www.spokesmanreview.com.

But a private meeting with a newspaper’s editorial board, even if it’s shown live on the Internet, is not the same as a live, public debate, McGavick insisted. Two televised debates is “absurdly small,” he said.

Meehan said that beyond the two debates the candidates will have “multiple joint appearances,” just as Senate candidates in 2004 did. He called it “a fair and reasonable approach to the few remaining weeks of the election.”