October 27, 2009 04:11 AM UTC

McInnis: No Debates With Penry

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• by: Colorado Pols

(Bumped into Tuesday with additional thoughts – promoted by Colorado Pols)

From Politics West:

GOP gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis told the Associated Press this afternoon that he has no plans to debate fellow Republicans Josh Penry and Dan Maes.  This, of course, means that staffers/supporters of his opponents will start descending upon McInnis events wearing chicken suits and holding signs that call him “Chicken McNugget” or “McChicken,” or some such…

Apparently, ‘it would just give the Democrats ammunition.’ From the AP report cited:

GOP gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis on Monday refused to share the stage with his chief party rival and said he had no plans to debate him before next year’s primary…

“We don’t see any use in debates for Republicans in a family discussion taking shots at each other,” McInnis said. “This is an in-the-family situation, and we want to talk about the issues and not give the Democrats the bylines for their commercials.”

…Until Monday, Penry held out hope for at least one debate.

“If you can’t stand in front of a friendly crowd of businessmen, what are you going to do when the bullets are flying and the stakes are highest? It’s silly,” Penry said.

Despite what you might think at first glance, this is actually very bad news for Penry, because it shows that McInnis is confident enough in his own internal polling and campaign operation that he doesn’t view Penry as a legitimate threat anymore. Penry may not be able to keep up with McInnis in fundraising (he came in third behind McInnis and Gov. Bill Ritter in the Q3 fundraising period), and he’s been flailing away with talking points that consistently contradict each other.

Candidates ignore opponents when they don’t feel like they have anything to gain by engaging them (in 2004 Ken Salazar rightly refused to debate Mike Miles because there was no upside for Salazar in doing so), and it sets the tone that McInnis is the frontrunner. Even if McInnis isn’t completely confident that he is well ahead of Penry at this point, this is a smart political move to set the tone and put Penry on the defensive in the position of “also-ran” (note how McInnis lumps Penry in with Dan Maes, the latter, of course, being completely irrelevent).

Penry needs to respond to this, and fast, before the narrative becomes permanent.

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