POLITICAL BRIEFING

DEBATE DILEMMA: Campaign debates were heralded as a boon to 1992’s crop of Democratic presidential candidates because they would help them gain the public attention they badly need. But the early debates are causing their fair share of headaches.

Last month’s forum on health policy in Nashua, N.H., for instance, was just starting when two insurgent candidates loudly protested their exclusion from the panel. The two--maverick Democratic candidate and former Irvine, Calif., Mayor Larry Agran and Lenora B. Fulani, candidate of the New Alliance Party, succeeded in shouting their way onto the dais. The flap, complained backers of the major contenders, stole attention not only from their candidates but from the health care issue itself, which many Democrats see as their trump card in the fall election.

To avoid such disruptions at the next debate, scheduled for Manchester on Sunday night, Democratic Party officials have shifted the site from a public auditorium to a television studio. And the forum is to be limited to the five major candidates.

Enter, again, the scrappy Agran campaign, which is threatening to file a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission charging that by agreeing to the use of their studio, Manchester station WMUR is making an illegal contribution to the debate’s sponsor, the state Democratic Party. Agran’s goal is to persuade WMUR to take over the debate--and invite him.