Ah, the spin room…

I wasn’t there long before a woman from the League of Conservation Voters approached me and pushed a press release into my hand. It decried Barack Obama’s decision yesterday to start turning down invitations to debates and forums not sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee. (The League wants Obama and all the other Democrats to say yes to a forum on energy and global warming that would be held in California later this fall.)

I asked top Obama strategist David Axelrod what was up.

He told me:

We’ve done eight debates and we’re going to do seven more. Once in a while you want to spend time with your fellow Americans, too.

But don’t televised debates have the potential to reach more Americans than one-on-one candidate interaction with likely voters? Axelrod replied:

It’s only one way to meet people. We’re not TV programming. This is not a traveling Vaudeville act. There are candidates who want to have interaction with regular people and you can’t do that if you’re running from television set to television set.

Then Axelrod added—”frankly,” he said—that at this early date, the debates are being watched mostly by “a lot of political junkies and a lot of score-keepers.”

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean was also in the spin room, and echoed Axelrod’s perception of who’s watching the debates.

Dean told me that at this early date, “the penetration of these debates is among political junkies and political journalists.”

He wouldn’t bite on the question of whether Obama was right to start fending off non-DNC-sanctioned debate requests. But there was some cheering of Obama’s move from apparently road-weary political journalists.

As far as political junkie voters go, however, Dean told me the number of debates probably isn’t a problem.

I don’t think it numbs voters at all. I don’t think there’s any fatigue factor, except among the candidates.

That last statement seemed very true this morning. All the candidates looked a bit tired. Perhaps a desire to crawl back in bed was responsible for the lack of fireworks? Clinton herself joked about the early hour in her first answer. As transcribed by ABC News’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos”:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Biden… You told Newsweek magazine that Senator Obama is “not yet ready” to be president. Senator Clinton, is he right?

(LAUGHTER)

CLINTON: Well, George, I was going to say good morning…

(LAUGHTER)

… and, as soon as I wake up, I’ll answer your question.

(LAUGHTER)