December 13, 2013   GOP primary debates didn’t damage Romney  By
PHILIP KLEIN | AUGUST 18, 2013 AT 1:45 PM  Republican National
Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Sunday defended the party’s
non-binding resolution boycotting debates on CNN and NBC during
the 2016 presidential primaries if the networks air films on
early Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, the Washington
Examiner’s Tim Mak recounted.  Appearing on ABC’s “This Week,”
Priebus said, “These guys are making it a lot easier for us to
pare [the number of debates] down to a reasonable number.”  Mak
notes the conventional wisdom that, “The 20 GOP debates in 2012
are widely seen as a mistake by Republican leaders, who claim
that bias by the hosting networks undercut their candidates and
ultimately damaged Romney, their eventual nominee.”  But this
conventional wisdom is largely a myth. When a candidate loses a
presidential race, it’s quite common for analysts to look back
and blame all sorts of things for that candidate’s eventual
loss, even if th