As the Democratic presidential hopefuls debated on Wednesday night in New Hampshire, a debate broke out about the decision of the leading Republican candidates to skip a televised forum scheduled for last night that was to focus on issues important to black and Hispanic voters.
None of the leading Republican candidates plan to attend the forum, which the TV host Tavis Smiley will moderate at Morgan State University in Maryland, and which will be broadcast live on public television. All the leading Democratic candidates attended a similar debate moderated by Smiley in June at Howard University in Washington.
Instead of attending the forum, which has been in the works for months, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney are scheduled to be in California, former senator Fred Thompson in Tennessee and Senator John McCain in New York City.
"I'm very disappointed by it," said Michael Steele, the chairman of Gopac, an organization that tries to groom Republican candidates, who said that he had spent months trying to get all the candidates to attend the forum.
"The hope was that it would be a chance for these guys to get out there and have a direct conversation with African-Americans and minorities across the country and lay out their visions," he said.
Steele, who became the first African-American to win statewide office in Maryland when he was elected lieutenant governor, added, "It's hard enough as a black Republican to stand up in the community and say, `Trust me, these guys really do care,' and then, when given the opportunity to show that, these folks don't see the follow-through."
A Republican debate on Univision, the Spanish-language television network, was canceled this month because McCain was the only leading candidate to agree to attend.
The top Democratic candidates did debate on the network.
The decision to skip the forum was criticized in an editorial in the Washington Times, a conservative-leaning newspaper, which said, "It is striking that the Republican front-runners believe that some run-of-the mill fundraiser is more important than building up their relationships with black and Hispanic voters, groups who flock to the Democratic Party in droves."
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