For those waiting on pins and needles for the debates between Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and his… For those waiting on pins and needles for the debates between Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and his challengers in the Democratic primary, City Councilman Patrick Dowd and attorney Carmen Robinson, the past several weeks have brought nothing but bad news. First, as a result of the shooting deaths of three Pittsburgh police officers last weekend, local broadcast stations WPXI-TV and KDKA-TV both rescheduled the primary debates for a later time.

And now Ravenstahl has said that his camp has no open dates to which they can move the KDKA debate, effectively canceling it. Dowd objected to the move, of course — if the debate were to go forward it would only be him and Robinson. Neither of them is an incumbent, so it’s hard to think that much influential debate would occur.

According to the Ravenstahl camp, the only open date they have before the May 19 Democratic primary is May 4, which is also the date that WPXI took with their rescheduled debate. But we understand how difficult scheduling can be sometimes, especially when there’s so many sports games and concerts to go to in the next few weeks — although, unfortunately, Kenny Chesney won’t be back in town until June 6.

‘ Even so, to the casual observer, it certainly looks as though Ravenstahl is chickening out of a debate. Debates are one of the only ways that the voting public can get to know the candidates’ stances on a variety of issues, as well as to see how they respond under pressure. The fact that Ravenstahl is so willing to just throw one away without making more of an effort to reschedule certainly doesn’t help his image.

But for his part, Dowd doesn’t seem gracious or understanding. He accused Ravenstahl of using the shooting deaths as an excuse to get out of the debates, a comment that Ravenstahl’s own camp called ‘disgusting, offensive and completely out of line’ in a letter to KDKA.

Although Dowd did bring up some valid points about the state of the mayor’s office, such as ethical concerns over campaign contributions and personal use of city property, his comments strike a particularly sour note that might portray him as too quick to play the blame-game.

But really, we shouldn’t expect anything different. This is the state of political discourse in modern America: accusatory sniping from behind the cover of press releases and prepared statements while avoiding actual discourse as much as possible.

The real shame of this story is that the other two debates that remain will necessarily be more rushed and have to encompass a larger amount of material, lowering the effectiveness of the whole process. Either that, or everything that was planned for the third debate will have to be dropped entirely, which would be just as much of a loss.

Either way, the only person winning out on this is Ravenstahl, who gets to go into the primary with an incumbent status, a huge political war chest and, now, one debate less than anyone was anticipating. We can’t say whether Ravenstahl’s choice to cancel rather than reschedule was entirely political or simply fell to scheduling conflicts, but we can say that regardless, it didn’t hurt his chances.

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