Sixteen candidates remain in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Fifteen of them were invited to Wednesday night’s debates. And then there was Jim Gilmore.
“I’m very disappointed,” the former Virginia governor told me when I reached him on Wednesday. He paused, as if reflecting on his word choice. “Uh, actually, I’m angry,” he revised. In fact, “I’m really upset about this.”
Gilmore warmed quickly to this thesis.
“It’s wrong and against the public interest,” he said of debate host CNN’s decision to disallow his participation, even in the pre-debate debate of minor candidates, based on his sub-1-percent standing in the polls. “CNN is not being faithful to the stewardship they’ve taken on.”
Gilmore would like to take up his grievance directly with CNN’s Washington bureau chief, Sam Feist, but “the guy won’t even call me back, which I consider a personal insult,” he said.