Martin O'Malley

would have been the case. It seemed like Hillary Clinton because of her extensive career and name recognition and Bernie Sanders, because he was offering a message from outside the Democratic Party paradigm, sucked up all the attention in the room.

The scheduling was always such that viewership was going to be lower. It does tie into the complaint that a lot of Sanders supporters have, that on everything from how the debates were scheduled to various other arcane rules, it seemed to all be -- let’s use the word "rigged" -- for Hillary Clinton. Did you feel that way?

They didn’t have that complaint when the debates were delayed, because it actually worked for both Sen. Sanders and Hillary Clinton to be the only two. They kinda liked it that way. We heard those complaints from Sen. Sanders only after the primary schedule started to roll out. Initially, I was unable -- though we asked [Sanders] and asked his campaign, to get him to join me in calling for an earlier debate schedule and more debates. I’m sure they made a tactical decision that it wasn’t in their best interest to do that.

Had he joined us, we would have had more debates. I’ll leave it to you to imagine what might have happened differently if the Democratic Party were on the air answering Donald Trump during his rise in the Republican debates, rather than remaining silent. I think the common thread [in both parties] is that it really did become so much more driven by ratings than we’ve ever had before.

You think? That was my perception as well.

I think there are some parallels. I’ve become friendly with Gov. Jeb Bush -- only Donald Trump can do that to me! As we talked, unpacked our very different experiences in the last presidential race, we weren’t shy at the time at kicking over the soup and saying it was very irresponsible of the Democratic Party not to be debating, not to telling the alternative story to the story that Donald Trump was spinning. Shame on us as we watched this Trump candidacy rise, becoming more and more overt in its scapegoating and other characteristics of strongman politics like we’ve seen before, and we were silent. We didn’t have our first debate until, I think, October. I’m not sure we ever really had a prime-time debate.

If we continue down this road, there’s a real concern that our presidential debates, our primary debates — I distinguish them from the general election debates where there’s a commission and there’s rules and there’s equal time — are in danger of going down the road where they look more like the Jerry Springer show crossed with "Hollywood Squares" than a traditional presidential debate. I think among the issues that we have to tackle to restore the integrity and trust in our democracy, those presidential primary debates are certainly one of them.'