Hurt declines Charlottesville debates<\/a><\/p>\nLast week, Robert Hurt proposed a series of five debates for the candidates for the Republican 5th district candidates. The various Tea Party groups had proposed their own series of three debates prior to this.<\/p>\n
Based of the various Tea Party groups’ record, those debates have a high potential to devolve into shouting matches and Hurt had absolutely nothing to gain by participating in their events. Hurt has a very little chance to ever get the vote of any of the devoted teaparty activists and he (and his strategists) know that. By setting up his own series of debates, Hurt implicitly declared himself as the front-runner by being able to control the number and location of debates. All of the other candidates have to fall in line with Hurt’s proposals because those are the only debates that will be “fair”. By making today’s announcement, Hurt has made a move which tells the teapartiers that he really doesn’t need to participate in anything that they do. Considering that the teapartiers are erratic at best, it’s definitely in Hurt’s interest to stay as far away from them as possible. <\/p>\n
Hurt has made this move with a reasoning which is perfectly logical. Why would a State Senator do a debate in the middle of the legislative session? The timing of the teaparty debates were strange and Hurt shut the door on them. It’s a shame that the University of Virginia College Republicans’ debate also falls in this time frame, but I feel that this debate is just collateral damage from the strategy that Hurt is using. <\/p>\n
Although I question Hurt’s call for a large number of debates (because the frontrunner has very little to gain from a debate), this also could be a part of a good strategy. All Hurt has to do is stand back and let the other candidates attack each other and cannibalize themselves.<\/p>\n
We’ll see how things progress over the next few weeks. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gotta admit, I called this one as soon as he proposed a set of five debates…<\/p>\n
[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newscentral","category-opinioncentral","odd"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwqFk-1AV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6408,"url":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2010\/02\/11\/the-tea-parties-do-their-own-5th-district-food-chain\/","url_meta":{"origin":6133,"position":0},"title":"The TEA parties do their own 5th District Food Chain.","author":"SouthsideCentral","date":"February 11, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Everybody's getting in the Food Chain game! The TEA Party Perspective: \u201cThe Lump Report\u201d The leaders of the Danville, Lynchburg and Charlottesville TEA parties had a conference call (I would have loved to be in that call) and came up with their own ranking of the candidates. You can read\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "OpinionCentral"","block_context":{"text":"OpinionCentral","link":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/category\/opinioncentral\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6247,"url":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2010\/01\/23\/lets-recap-fridays-tea-party-debate\/","url_meta":{"origin":6133,"position":1},"title":"Let’s recap Friday’s Tea Party Debate","author":"SouthsideCentral","date":"January 23, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Five of the six candidates for the 5th District Republican nomination met in Charlottesville last night. So what happened, who won and who lost? Laurence Verga, Feda Morton, Ron Ferris, Mike McPadden, Ken Boyd & Jim McKelvey attended the debate, with Robert Hurt passing on this one due to General\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "OpinionCentral"","block_context":{"text":"OpinionCentral","link":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/category\/opinioncentral\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6184,"url":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2010\/01\/16\/so-that-happened-down-in-south-hill\/","url_meta":{"origin":6133,"position":2},"title":"“So that happened” down in South Hill…","author":"SouthsideCentral","date":"January 16, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Ever seen the movie \"Vantage Point\"? It tells a story from the viewpoints of multiple people, each with their own motivations. If you'd like to see a local version of \"Vantage Point\", it happened this week in South Hill during a Q&A session with the seven candidates for the Republican\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "NewsCentral"","block_context":{"text":"NewsCentral","link":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/category\/newscentral\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7038,"url":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2010\/06\/20\/5th-district-happenings-update-1\/","url_meta":{"origin":6133,"position":3},"title":"5th District Happenings (Update #1)","author":"SouthsideCentral","date":"June 20, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Conventional wisdom says that the few weeks after a hard-fought primary should be downtime for the candidates as they rest up for a long general election run. That hasn't happened in Virginia's 5th District. Let's kick off a series of updates on what's going on... The first blunder of this\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "OpinionCentral"","block_context":{"text":"OpinionCentral","link":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/category\/opinioncentral\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6585,"url":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2010\/03\/20\/random-thoughts-from-todays-republican-debate\/","url_meta":{"origin":6133,"position":4},"title":"Random thoughts from today’s Republican debate","author":"SouthsideCentral","date":"March 20, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Today, the candidates for the 5th District Republican nomination had their third in a series of debates sponsored by the area TEA parties. I was able to attend the first half of the debate and here are some random thoughts that came out of the first half. I'm sorry that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "LIVE!Central"","block_context":{"text":"LIVE!Central","link":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/category\/livecentral\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6889,"url":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2010\/05\/09\/5th-district-republican-primary-update-1\/","url_meta":{"origin":6133,"position":5},"title":"5th District Republican Primary – Update #1","author":"SouthsideCentral","date":"May 9, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Let's get back into politics and see what's been going on in the race for the Republican nomination for the 5th District House of Representatives fall election. We've done a few Food Chain!s before, but this is SC's first straight-up update. Starting at the bottom of our last Food Chain\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "OpinionCentral"","block_context":{"text":"OpinionCentral","link":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/category\/opinioncentral\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}