What did The Donald mean and when did he mean it?
Most important, after each debate, the media will spend the next 24 to 48 hours debating what Trump really meant by his latest bizarre utterance and if that particular off-the-wall remark represents the last straw, sinking his campaign.
Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta rightly ribbed Trump for engaging in shenanigans around these debates.
The bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates had chosen the dates before Clinton won the nod and the NFL announced its schedule.
Yet in this ugly election season, it’s voters who should wonder if the debate schedule is fair to the electorate.
The debate commission will look at the polls after Labor Day to see if a third-party candidate has hit 15 percent support in five unnamed national polls.
Commission Co-Chair Frank Fahrenkopf recently told CNBC the panel would “consider giving an inch” to an outsider — if, for example, a candidate hit an average of 14.5 in polls with a margin of error in the 3 percentage point range.
[...] as Pace University political science Professor David Caputo told me, small tweaks are OK, but if the commission dumps its rules to accommodate a low-polling Johnson, “I think it would be very difficult” to say no to Trump’s demands for, say, time slots that are likely to draw top ratings or “fair” moderators.