This one was tipped off by Marc Ambinder with a statement now appearing on Senator Obama’s campaign Web site from David Plouffe:

We have just been thru a period of three debates/forums in six days and the outlook for the future holds more of the same. And, because of likely calendar movement, once we get past Labor Day the Iowa caucuses are less than 120 days away.

So far, Barack has attended seven Democratic debates and nineteen candidate forums. There are five remaining sanctioned DNC debates, which we are committed to attend and two Iowa debates normally held in January, which are being held in December, which we are also committed to attend. We will also be attending the Univision debate in Florida on September 9. This means that by the end of this year, Obama will have participated in a total of 15 Democratic debates…

Unfortunately, we simply cannot run the kind of campaign we want and need to, engaging with voters in the early states and February 5 states, if our schedule is dictated by dozens of forums and debates. Ultimately, the one group left out of the current schedule is the voters and they are the ones who ask the toughest questions and most deserve to have those questions answered face to face.

Therefore, after this week, we will only be attending the five DNC debates through the sanctioning period of December 10, Univision, and the two Iowa debates previously mentioned. Candidate forums - where candidates appear sequentially will be considered, but we are unlikely to accept many of these. Instead, Barack will spend his time answering questions directly from voters in places like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, and elsewhere. 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.

My take? I 100% agree there are too many of these debates and forums. The reality though is Sen. Obama decided to get into a 2008 race in early 2007.

Also despite Marc Ambinder’s assertion that Obama is inoculated from criticism on this move, watching the Senators debate performance leads one to easily make the argument that this move is a way of avoiding being in the ring with his competition. When this race started the common assumption was that Obama had an untapped reservoir of rhetorical power and Sen. Clinton wouldn’t be able to come across on television. The complete opposite has come out of these debates with Clinton coming across pretty warm and Obama pretty green.

Frankly Obama has never run a national campaign before and had almost no serious competition in his Senate bid. He is going to need all the experience in a debate setting he can get to prepare for any potential bid in a general election. Just my take.