Obama is cutting back on debates, his campaign says

Tired of trudging from one debate to the next, Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign is saying “Enough.”

A Web posting Saturday by his campaign manager said that the schedule of unceasing debates and forums in the Democratic presidential campaign was proving a distraction.

Obama will decline new debate invitations until mid- December, the posting said, and after that, he will consider requests case by case.

Meanwhile, he remains committed to six debates in coming months.

“We simply cannot continue to hopscotch from forum to forum and run a campaign true to the bottom-up movement for change that propelled Barack into this race,” campaign manager David Plouffe wrote in the posting on the campaign website’s blog.

Fellow Democratic candidate John Edwards, interviewed Saturday night, said in reaction: “I think we need to give Iowa caucus-goers as much exposure as we can. Debates are a good thing.” The former North Carolina senator was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to speak at a rally.

A campaign spokesman for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) declined to comment.

A 90-minute Democratic debate this morning, hosted by George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, will be Obama’s eighth debate since entering the race in February, according to his campaign. He has also participated in 19 forums (in which candidates typically appear onstage separately to field questions from a moderator).

Obama has attended three debates or forums in just the last six days, Plouffe wrote on the blog, “and the outlook for the future holds more of the same.”

The time and preparation required for debates has provoked grumbling in some campaigns. What’s more, although the debates offer a chance for candidates to distinguish themselves, they are also a platform for gaffes and dustups that can knock a candidate off stride.

Obama got into a spat with Clinton last month when he said at a debate that he would be willing to meet with leaders of hostile nations without preconditions in his first year as president -- a comment she seized on as “naive.” Speaking to Iowans on a campaign bus tour over the last few days, Obama was still trying to clarify what he had meant.

Clinton, for her part, was jeered at a recent debate for defending paid lobbyists and saying she would continue to accept their campaign donations.

Dennis J. Goldford, a professor and political analyst at Drake University in Des Moines, site of today’s debate, said: “There have been so many [debates] that even for those who are political professionals or political observers, there’s a ho-hum reaction to the announcement of the next debate. With that many people, it’s hard to get anything of any real substance, unless they make a gaffe.

“Hillary is considered to be doing very well with these debates. Edwards seems increasingly angry. Obama sounds inexperienced.”

Within the Obama campaign, the preference seems to be to have the candidate engage with voters on its own terms.

In Iowa, he has been taking questions from the public in town-hall-type settings. People are asked to stand, speak into a microphone and be succinct. The questions frequently involve serious subjects -- the Iraq war and healthcare, for example -- and are often posed deferentially.

At a utility company in Waverly on Saturday, a questioner asked what books Obama would recommend.

He mentioned Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” a look at Abraham Lincoln and his Civil War Cabinet. Then he used the question to parry a criticism he often hears -- that he lacks experience.

“Here’s a guy who, by the way, didn’t have much experience in Washington,” the Illinois senator said of Lincoln. “Everybody thought he was kind of a yokel from, um, Illinois.”

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peter.nicholas@latimes.com

Times staff writer Mark Z. Barabak contributed to this report.