CHICAGO _ Say what you want about President Donald Trump's off-color comments about the size of his manhood, the crowded 2016 Republican presidential debates were an undeniable ratings smash.
Next time around the Democrats might be aping the widescreen format: Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said Wednesday night that he expects "a double-digit number of candidates" in the field for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
Speaking to University of Chicago students at the university's Institute of Politics, Perez said, "I would welcome that because sometimes I hear people say we don't have a bench of presidential candidates, and I could not disagree with that more."
Perez didn't identify any candidates he expected to run, though former Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, and U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan have all been rumored to be considering a 2020 run. The Republicans in 2016 had 17 candidates, forcing underperforming candidates off the main stage and into a second-tier debate. A double-digit Democratic field would be a significant increase on the half a dozen Democrats who ran in 2016.
"I think that debate (would be) spectacular," Perez said. "My job is to make sure the playing field is level."
Perez, who upset student supporters of Bernie Sanders by failing to commit to get rid of superdelegates in the 2020 primary, was far less keen to discuss The Washington Post's scoop that the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the research that resulted in a notorious dossier on Trump.
"You're going to have to ask the folks who were at the DNC at that time," he said, noting that he was the labor secretary in the Obama administration at the time. "I learned about the dossier a few days ago, OK?"
Asked how that was possible, he said "We knew that we were paying for opposition research at the DNC, but we didn't ask questions about who they were hiring in the context of doing their research."
