Dana, Terrified of Debating Debbie, Muddies the Waters.

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Now I’m the sort of guy who makes it a point of honor to praise his worst enemies for their positive traits.  As such, I always gave props to Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) for being, alone among the OC Congresscritters ensconced in their Safe Seats, the only one to always debate his challenger even though he doesn’t have to.

Gary Miller debate Ed Chau?  Don’t make me laugh.  Ed Royce debate Christina Avalos?  “Christina who?”  Ken Calvert debate Bill Hedrick?  Dream on.  John Campbell debate Steve Young?  He’d sooner face a root canal unanaesthetized.  Loretta debate Rosie Avila?  I would pay to see that, but not gonna happen.

BUT.  At least as long as I’ve been in town, Dana has always cheerfully and sportingly agreed to multiple debates – the last two times with Jim Brandt, before that with Gerri Schipske.  And I thought that showed guts.

STILL.  We had wondered, now that he’s facing his most formidable challenger EVER in the charismatic, Mensa-smart, cutthroat-witty HB Mayor Debbie Cook, whether Dana would keep to this admirable record.  Or, more to the point, how exactly he would weasel out of it.

And now we have our answer: AWKWARDLY.

In a Friday article in the Huntington Beach Independent, Rohrabacher’s spokesperson Phaedra Dugan said that Debbie Cook had refused to debate. The Cook Campaign never refused to debate with Rohrabacher and prior to Cook’s challenge had agreed to one debate on Oct. 21.

“It is not surprising that Dana Rohrabacher has chosen to bring Washington politics back home and try to mislead people about these debates,” said Kevin Thurman, Cook’s Campaign Manager. “We have never turned down a debate or forum with Congressman Rohrabacher. We ask that his campaign respond to our letter asking for three debates.”

Because the district straddles two counties, the Cook campaign has asked for three debates located across the district, two in Orange County and one in Los Angeles County. The Cook campaign also wants debates before Oct. 6, the day absentee ballots are sent out.

The Cook Campaign has yet to receive an official response from the Rohrabacher campaign. Thurman sent the certified letter asking for three debates to Rhonda Rohrabacher, the Congressman’s wife and campaign manager, early last week.

Matt “Jubal” Cunningham (whose motto is “Oh!  Muddying waters?  Here, I’ve got an extra oar you can use”) helpfully suggests a variant of the old wifebeater’s “You brought it on yourself” line:

The Cook campaign is currently pursuing the classic challenger strategy of trying to hector the incumbent into a series of debates…in this case, three of the. [sic]

Dana Rohrabacher, being the incumbent, is willing to have one. If the Cook campaign persists in insisting on three, my guess is Dana will eventually decline to have any, saying the Cook camp had its chance for one and now won’t get any.

That’s right, Dana, you listen to Jubal, and let the b**ch have it!  But really, if you were Dana, wouldn’t you be doing whatever you could to avoid a debate debacle with Debbie?  Just think of what could go wrong!  Why, somebody could bring up:

• GLOBAL WARMING.  And you would pull out your old discredited list of quasi-scientists, non-climate-change scientists, and humorous forged names, to back your contention that global warming is a huge hoax, but inside you would be quaking knowing that you’re facing an expert on the subject, who convinced the majority-Republican HB City Council to unanimously back the Mayors’ Agreement on Climate Change.
• ENERGY POLICY.  And you would start barking “Drill Here!  Drill Now!” thinking that with gas prices where they are that would be a sure-fire winner, and assuming (like Jubal still does) that Debbie is just a knee-jerk environmentalist against any new drilling, never having bothered to read her very nuanced statements on the topic, which allow for very careful and controlled offshore drilling but only as a band-aid to our huge energy challenge.  Meanwhile you would be facing a WORLD-RENOWNED EXPERT on energy policy who is full of plans for starting a new Green economy, while your single-minded focus on Drilling Here, Drilling Now, would only serve to remind the audience of your utter disrespect of and indifference to our beaches and Debbie’s untiring advocacy for them.
• IMMIGRATION.  You would run the risk of having the audience erupt in laughter, like they did two years ago, when you bring up “the illegals” for the tenth time in a debate as a reason that nothing can be done about any of a number of problems you don’t care about.  Meanwhile you would be surprised again to learn that Debbie, no open-borders advocate, again has a very nuanced and reasonable position, humane but concerned about overpopulation and our declining wages.  And not using immigrants as a scapegoat in every other sentence.
• HEALTH CARE.  You would say that we can’t have affordable universal healthcare BECAUSE OF THE ILLEGALS.  While Debbie, recently declared a “healthcare hero” by the California Nurses’ Association, will patiently explain to you and the audience why we need a single-payer system like all other civilized nations have.
• THE WAR.  You would try to distance yourself from the disastrous illegal war that you egged on from the start, complaining about how incompetently Bush and Rumsfeld have run it, but it would be difficult for you with the record of your rhapsodizing about all the “flowers” the grateful Iraqis would throw at us in return for invading them, and your constant votes in favor of it.  Meanwhile Debbie might expound knowledgeably on what we all know by now – that this was a war for oil – and detail the “Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq” to which she is a signatory and a special energy-policy adviser.
• TORTURE AND GUANTANAMO.  You would try to get some laughs minimizing the abuse we put our prisoners through at Gitmo and elsewhere as mainly “panties on the head” and lampoon torture critics as “holier-than-thou,” but are likely to receive many more hisses and boos than laughs.  Meanwhile – and as usual I can’t speak for Debbie – but she would probably call for the closing of Guantánamo as both Presidential candidates have, and for us returning to being a nation of laws that abides by the Geneva Conventions and doesn’t torture.  And almost everyone there would erupt in applause.  That would be bad.
• YOUR RECORD.  Oh, that would be even worse.  What could you claim to have done for the district in all these twenty years?  And I bet Debbie would be prepared to talk about that.

I sympathize with Dana’s terror.