October 16, 2015, 12:23 pm
By Mark Hensch
Former Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) believes that CNN stacked the odds for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) during the Democratic presidential debate on Tuesday.
“Online poll: Was the CNN #DemDebate rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton?” he tweeted Friday, referencing a Daily Caller sampling that shows 98 percent answering “yes.”
Webb’s post follows his insistence late Thursday that CNN moderator Anderson Cooper helped the network’s coverage skew toward Clinton and Sanders.
“I’m going to be very frank, it was rigged in terms of who was going to get the time on the floor by the way that Anderson Cooper was selecting people to supposedly respond to something someone else said,” he said during an address atthe Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
“It’s very difficult to win a debate when you don’t have the opportunity to speak the same amount of time on issues as the others did,” the long-shot Democratic White House hopeful said.
“It’s a reality that the debate was being portrayed as a showdown between Mrs. Clinton and Bernie, but if you’re going to be invited to participate and people are going to judge whether you, quote, ‘won’ or not, at least you should be able to have the kind of time that’s necessary to discuss the issues that you care about, that you’ve worked on,” Webb added.
You’re in the wrong party, Webb, if you don’t aspire to be just another disposable and replaceable cog in the wheel.