Attorney General's Race Challenger Debating Debates

August 7, 2009

FAIRFAX - The following is a copy of the email Senator Cuccinelli sent to Steve Shannon just moments ago.

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Steve:

I appreciate your "prompt" reply to my initial debate challenge that I sent on July 13th.

I was a bit surprised however to read your list of "agreed" upon dates in your letter. For starters, the date for the Prince William Committee of 100 (PWC 100) debate was entirely false. We were still working with the PWC 100 as recently as this morning to settle on a date.

PWC 100 debate organizers told my staff this afternoon that your campaign said you released an inaccurate date because you just wanted to say you had agreed to certain debates instead of listing "TBA" for the date.

And WTOP was pretty surprised to hear of your assertion that they had scheduled a debate. Mark Plotkin, the presumed moderator, confirmed this over the phone with my staff this afternoon and apologized (though HE had nothing to apologize for).

Steve, what's going on here? I've never known you to just abandon common courtesy like this - and I don't mean courtesy to me or my campaign, I'm talking about all of these third parties that you're yanking around. This is still Virginia and I think Virginians reasonably expect more professionalism than what we're seeing in your latest stunt (this is an actual "political stunt," unlike my request to call a special session to deal with a real problem in our criminal justice system which you called a "political stunt"). Could this be because you're feeling the heat from voters for not debating me? And suddenly you're trying to give the impression of activity?

If you were so desperate to release a debate schedule with nonexistent dates, you should have just invited me to debate you in person while you were filming your debate with your dog.

I'm curious, how many takes did you have to go through until you got your dog to bark at just the right moment? Don't you think the time you spent debating your dog would have been better spent speaking to voters about substantive issues they care about?

I ask you Steve, if you have enough time to be filming web ads with dogs, why don't you have enough time to debate me before October?

You've provided a list of 3 debates. These three take place in either Northern VA or Richmond. We've only debated once so far, and that was in Virginia Beach in an unpublicized appearance that you only FINALLY agreed to two days before it happened (you remember, if I didn't agree to your restrictions, you weren't going to debate). What about debating in Southside, Roanoke, the Shenandoah Valley, Eastern Virginia and Southwest? I've been taking my campaign to every corner of the Commonwealth for over a year now, why won't you join me there?

The point of my original 12-debate challenge was to take us around the Commonwealth so that we would have the opportunity to address voters in every corner of Virginia and talk about the issues they care about. Those issues differ from one part of Virginia to another.

So I am going to ask you again. Why won't you accept our 12 debate challenge? What are you so afraid of?

Contact: Chris LaCivita (804) 594-3710