The Quadrennial Sham: The Case for Truly Open Debates

Columbia Journalism Review

Anthony Marro
May/June, 2004

In the spring of 2001, Newsday began televising live daily business news reports from its newsroom. Charlie Zehren, an excellent reporter with no prior television experience, had volunteered for the job, and a small crowd gathered around to watch his first effort. He was sitting on a tall chair in the middle of the newsroom, wired for sound and looking intently into the camera.

"Christ, I'm sweating worse than Nixon," he said.

It had been forty-one years since Nixon had sweated under the klieg lights, and Zehren had been just two years old at the time. But in our national consciousness the image has remained vivid, a powerful reminder that while it's difficult to win a presidential debate in any measurable sense, the risk of losing one is very high. An untimely stammer, a slip of the tongue, a momentary lapse in judgment or beads of sweat on a forehead can do serious harm.

It happened to Gerald Ford when he said in his second debate with Jimmy Carter that there was "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe." The Soviets had somewhere between ten and fifteen Army divisions in Poland at the time, and reporters began calling Air Force One "The Spirit of Free Poland." It happened to Dan Quayle when he suggested that he had just as much political experience at age forty-one as John Kennedy had when he was elected president, leaving himself open to the sucker punch from Lloyd Bentsen. And it happened to George H. W. Bush when he was caught on camera toward the end of a 1992 debate looking at his watch, like a commuter wondering if he still had time to catch the 10:49 from Penn Station to Great Neck.

The lesson that candidates and their managers have learned from such stumbles is that if they can't avoid presidential campaign debates entirely -- which they managed to do between 1960 and 1976, but probably can't any longer -- they need to work very hard to control them. The preparations not only include briefing books the size of Volkswagens and rehearsals as intense as any on Broadway, but also negotiations over the color of the backdrop, the size of the podium, and the makeup of the audience. But mainly, they want to avoid the wild cards of aggressive questioners and third-party candidates, and of a real debate structure that might cause the candidates to veer away even momentarily from the carefully scripted sound bites of their campaigns.

The central point of George Farah's book is that since 1988 they've been aided and abetted in this by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which he considers a front for the two major parties and thus something of a fraud. His argument is that the CPD is really a bipartisan group, not a nonpartisan one, intent on preserving the two-party structure and working hard to deny third-party candidates a forum. In the process, he suggests, it has been able, in "secret" and "covert" ways, to turn control of the debates over to the major parties because the media collectively have either been asleep at the switch or quietly applauding the effort.

Farah is a student at Harvard Law School, and has produced something more like a well-crafted legal brief than a book. Unlike many legal briefs, it has the merit of being written in English. Like many legal briefs, it's somewhat redundant. He approaches the issue from many different vantage points, all of them ending with the same conclusion -- that the commission has hijacked the debates from the public and turned them over to the major parties, allowing the candidates to set most of the rules. Most importantly, it has managed -- with the exception of Ross Perot in 1996 -- to exclude third-party candidates completely.

Farah is the executive director of an organization called Open Debates, which wants to wrest control of the debates away from the current sponsors and replace them with a new organization called the Citizens Debate Commission. The members include two people -- the former third-party presidential candidate John Anderson and the conservative activist Angela "Bay" Buchanan -- whose politics are such that it's hard to imagine them agreeing on anything else. They also include Tom Gerety, the former president of Amherst; Paul Weyrich, the founding president of the Heritage Foundation; and Chellie Pingree, the head of Common Cause.

Their goal is not just to open up the debates to serious minority party candidates, but to turn them into real debates. The current format, with no direct candidate-to-candidate questioning, with limited follow-up questioning, with limited rebuttals, and with limited response times, has resulted less in real debates than in what have been described as "nationally televised joint appearances."

Most political reporters probably would agree that the major parties control the debates, or come close to it, but would be surprised to hear that anyone thought it was a secret. That was the intent at the start and Farah makes a persuasive case that it has become the reality. But it's probably still safer to say they come close to doing it, rather than that they control them absolutely, because there's at least a small legal fig leaf of separation between the debate sponsors and the parties.

The Commission on Presidential Debates was created in 1987 by Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., then the head of the Republican National Committee, and Paul G. Kirk Jr., then the head of the Democratic National Committee, who remain the co-chairs. The stated goal was to ensure that presidential debates would continue to be a part of every general election. The unstated goal was to take control away from the League of Women Voters, which had organized and managed the debates in 1976, 1980, and 1984. The major parties had become annoyed at the league because it had pushed the candidates into debate formats that they had resisted, had insisted on including John Anderson in a 1980 debate, and had tried to subject the candidates to questioning by reporters the candidates didn't want asking the questions.

In the years since it took control, the commission has continued to allow the candidates to avoid direct questioning of one another. It has further limited follow-up questioning. It has insisted that a third-party candidate must have a 15 percent support rating in pre-debate polls to be included, despite the fact that a party needs only 5 percent of the vote to qualify for federal campaign financing. It also managed to exclude Ross Perot in 1996 on the ground that he was un-electable, even though he had received enough votes in 1992 to qualify for federal funding. That meant that the public was paying for his campaign but not allowed to hear him debate. And the commission has continued to let the candidates nominate and veto panelists.

Except for the 1992 "town hall" debate, in which the audience was allowed to ask questions, Jim Lehrer of the PBS NewsHour has moderated every debate during the last three elections. Farah notes Lehrer's great competence and essential fairness, but also suggests that he's the sort of moderator both parties trust to stay within the parameters they're comfortable with. Then he quotes Pat Cadell, the pollster, as saying in 2000 that Lehrer was running the debates "as though they were some kind of sherry hour at the Institute for Politics at Harvard." And he quotes John Kerry as saying of those same debates, "You could have picked ten people off the street who didn't know Jerusalem from Georgia and they would have had better questions."

Part of the reason Farah's work reads like a legal brief is that legal issues are involved. Because the commission is a nonprofit and tax-exempt organization, the corporate contributions that fund the debates are tax-deductible. But IRS rules allow the deductions only for "nonpartisan" voter education. Farah argues that because the commission is actually "bipartisan" and thus biased against third-party candidates, the contributions shouldn't be deductible. So far, the IRS hasn't agreed.

Also, the Federal Election Commission prohibits corporations from contributing to debate sponsors unless the sponsors use pre-established objective criteria to select the participants. Farah argues that because most of the criteria are subjective, the contributions violate FEC rules. So far, the FEC and the courts haven't agreed.

The role of the CPD is an important story even if it isn't a crime, and while Farah's own footnotes suggest it has been given a fair amount of coverage, it's probably neither as widely known nor as fully understood as it should be. Farah's criticism of the media is more implied than direct, as when he writes that most voters "don't know why debate discourse has eroded, or why many intriguing candidates are excluded, or why Jim Lehrer moderates all the debates, or why participating candidates can't ask each other direct questions." But clearly he feels more voters would know if reporters worked harder to tell them.

His larger complaint -- and a reason why he argues that it's important to open the debates to other candidates -- is that the mainstream media usually don't cover them much at all. He's right about this, but wrong about why. He says it's because the major newspapers and networks are owned either by "political family dynasties ideologically committed to the major parties," or by giant corporations that don't want to give serious coverage to third-party candidates who are "vociferous critics of the corporate agenda."

The real reasons are less conspiratorial. They tend to be the result of tight budgets and attempts at parity. Covering a presidential campaign has become very costly, and editors are reluctant to spend money covering the campaigns of people who don't have a chance of becoming president. At days' end, the story they're covering is about who's going to be the president, and only one of two people -- either the Democratic or the Republican candidate -- is going to be. Most news organizations try to achieve balance and parity in the amount of coverage given the major party candidates. To give equal coverage to a minor party candidate could send the questionable message that the newspaper or network believes he or she has an equal chance of election.

Sometimes third-party candidates get coverage because they're forcing issues that otherwise wouldn't be addressed. And sometimes they're covered because they have something unique and important to say. But generally they tend to be covered to the degree they're thought to be able to affect the outcome. That means that the more serious a threat they are to the major party candidates the more coverage they're likely to get. Ross Perot was given serious and substantial coverage in both of his campaigns. The Libertarian Party candidates, who have not been seen as able to affect the outcome of recent elections, have been given very little coverage or none at all. In 2000, Ralph Nader was treated somewhere in between. He didn't get the coverage he felt he should have. But neither did he get the intense scrutiny that the media gave George W. Bush and Al Gore, although that's probably another issue for another time.

Farah has produced a useful book, well researched and clearly written. His complaints about the evil influence of corporate America on both the debates and the media are sometimes too vague and too sweeping, but his reporting on the collusion between the commission and the major party campaigns is detailed and persuasive.

It's persuasive enough that it should encourage reporters to examine the process, in order to foster a greater public debate about the debates. In the past, there's been much editorializing about the value of opening the debates to minor party candidates. But the public would also benefit from more reporting on the controls the candidates have over the process. And it might help things if reporters themselves would simply refuse to take part in the debate panels so long as the candidates have a role in picking the questioners. "I just feel very uncomfortable with the candidates selecting the reporters," said Tim Russert of NBC. He has good reason to be, and so do we all.

As for Farah's solution, the Citizens Debate Commission, some of the proposals are worthy ones. It would invite minor party candidates to debate so long as they were on enough state ballots to win an Electoral College majority and also registered respectably in national polls. It would allow follow-up questions and rebuttals. It would demand candidate-to-candidate questioning. It would limit the ability of candidates to veto moderators and panelists. It might not make the events more exciting than the baseball playoffs, but it might make them less like "nationally televised joint appearances" and more like real debates.

That means it's not likely to happen anytime soon. If Farah's group somehow managed to displace the Commission on Presidential Debates as the sponsor, through legal challenges or some other means, it's likely that the major party candidates would simply get together and rent a hall in Toledo and stage the debates on their own. They'd have to pay for it themselves, without corporate contributions, and they'd have to handle all the logistics. But the press would undoubtedly cover it. And the parties would keep control of the process, their main concern. The alternative would have them sweating worse than Nixon.