Pecking disorder: Diversity, inclusion and the Democratic debates

THE CRAZY quilt lineups for the first two Democratic presidential debates, in Miami, June 26 and 27, are already instructive in a constructive way, without a word said by anyone. With frontrunners cheek to jowl with also-rans and walking rounding errors, the debates on Wednesday and Thursday will be a raucous, panoramic example of democracy at its best, or certainly its most wide open.

For starters, this time there’s no undercard, no kid’s table, like we had in the Ring cycle of primary debates in 2016. The demographic hurly-burly of modern America is boiled down into two debates that promise to be a jumble of styles and substances.

Fight Night #1

Cory Booker

Julian Castro

Amy Klobuchar

Elizabeth Warren

Beto O’Rourke

Tulsi Gabbard

Bill De Blasio

Tim Ryan

Jay Inslee

John Delaney

Fight Night #2

Joe Biden

Bernie Sanders

Pete Buttigieg

Kamala Harris

Michael Bennet

Andrew Yang

Kirsten Gillibrand

Marianne Williamson

Eric Swalwell

John Hickenlooper

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Say what you will, the 20 candidates who made the cut are a diverse bunch. Nobody's likely to point a #CandidatesSoWhiteMale hashtag at this crowd. The breadth of this field of dreamers, it's 31-flavors aspect suggest that interest for both debates should be strong, even at this early point in the process. There's someone for everybody to love and hate. That's as basic to participatory democracy as you can get.

But the process of elimination has been brutal, as such things usually are. The Democratic National Committee selected the debate candidates using a qualifying threshold of 1 percent in three recognized opinion, and donations from 65,000 donors in the early primary states. That's a threshold that seems reasonable, at first blush; if you can' t get 1 percent in polls responding to you as a presidential candidate, what chance do you really have in the first place?

DNC Chairman Tom Perez recently defended it in just those terms. "They had a lot of time. A 1 percent bar, I think, is a fair bar. It’s hard to get a lower bar than 1 percent,” Perez said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “We gave folks a fair shake. We set forth these rules. I think they're fair. They're unprecedentedly inclusive, and 10 people is enough to manage.”

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BUT THIS approach to populating both debates has made for unexpected survivors and victims of the DNC winnowing process. Self-help author and Oprah confidante Marianne Williamson, a long shot for sure, got into the second-night debate. Four others -- Montana governor Steve Bullock, Miramar, Fla. mayor Wayne Messam, former Alaska senator Mike Gravel and Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton -- didn't make the cut for either night in Miami, failing to hit the threshold for inclusion. With states like historically conservative Montana and always-in-play Florida at stake next year, you’d think the DNC might have been more strategic in the criteria used to decide who made the cut.

At least two of the candidates bounced from the first two debates are angling for another shot, at one of the later debates later in the summer. If the field were smaller, that would be more of an issue, and a bigger percentage of the whole.

As it is, a field this big means that, for candidates who missed the first debates, a second shot is possible, if others who’ll be on the stage this week don’t catch fire. Improbable but true: Despite the metrical ruthlessness of the process, being bounced out of the early debates gives Bullock, Moulton, Messam and Gravel nothing less than a second chance to make a first impression.

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“Debates are important but they're not the be-all and end-all,” Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told the Washington Examiner. “Any of these candidates can find the moment where they catch on in a Cedar Rapids union hall or a Nashua dinner if they find an authentic narrative that resonates with voters and shows why they're the antidote to Trump.”

That’s why Messam has vowed to soldier on. “I’m still encouraged and I still have an opportunity to qualify for the July debates and full steam ahead,” he told the Sun-Sentinel in a telephone interview from Las Vegas.

It's no doubt that not making either debate is especially galling for Messam, mayor of a city not far from Miami, where the event goes down. But his willingness to stay in the race despite the uphill topography he faces shows his faith in democracy’s constant bedfellow — hope.

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THAT’S WHAT any aspirant to the White House gets if they’re serious, that prerequisite of presidential politics, American democracy, and the human condition: If you want to achieve what you've never achieved, you've got to be what you've never been.

Some in the punditocracy have suggested that the Democratic candidates now polling poorly shouldn't change course now, for fear of being labeled inauthentic or desperate. Stay the course and hope for the best. But that’s just bad advice.

Every step outside the comfort zone yields a dividend of surprise. Every potential breakthrough has a moment-one moment when the potential becomes real, when that breakthrough actually, literally, Happens. That’s what 20 Democratic candidates for the White House will be looking for, working for, starting Wednesday night.

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All of them, even the four who won’t be on stage, know that anything can happen. It's what that another son of Florida — the late, great Tom Petty— would tell us again, if only he could: “Even the losers get lucky sometimes.”

It’s sure as hell true in the context of presidential politics. A peanut farmer from Georgia started out in pre-pre-primary polling with a fraction of 1 percent support. Jimmy Carter went on to win the 1976 Democratic nomination.

Sometimes, luck, hard work and a message pay off. Sometimes, the losers aren’t losers at all.

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