The quadrennial political Kabuki over the scheduling of presidential debates has begun again. As is their usual practice, the members of the Commission on Presidential Debates are keeping a low public profile while allowing themselves to be bullied behind the scenes by the incumbent's handlers, who seem reluctant to agree to even a limited schedule of three debates with their opponent.
The latest from the Bush side is the suggestion, leaked to the media last week, that the president may skip one of the three scheduled face-offs with Kerry -- a debate planned in a town-hall–style format in which undecided voters from the St. Louis area would pose questions of their own to the candidates. The Bush team is also reportedly trying to shorten the two other scheduled debates, one in Miami, which will deal with domestic policy issues, and one in Tempe, Arizona, which will cover foreign policy.
Meanwhile, commission officials are increasingly concerned that unless the campaigns commit to a final schedule at least 10 days prior to the candidates' first meeting -- that is, by September 20 -- it will jeopardize the quality of the debates.
Here's a modest proposal for the Commission on Presidential Debates: Stop negotiating right now.
Inform both campaigns that the commission will be sponsoring three debates, the times, dates, and formats of which have already been announced. There will be a seat and a nameplate for each candidate; if only one of them shows up, he gets to answer the moderator's questions all by himself for 90 minutes, while the cameras show an empty chair where his opponent ought to be.
Kerry has already agreed to the three-debate schedule, and if the commission places its imprimatur on the event he will show up. This puts the Republicans in a dilemma: either allow Kerry 90 minutes of uninterrupted access to voters nationwide, or put President Bush on stage with him.
Most of the major broadcast networks indicated last week that they have not finalized coverage plans for the debates, but all seem prepared to give them significant airtime. ABC spokesperson Julie Summersgill said that the network would devote two hours of prime-time programming per debate to each of the commission's three events.
Asked what the network would do if the president failed to show up for a debate, but John Kerry did, she said, “You tell me what the debate commission says about it, and I'll tell you what we'll do.”
The major television networks may not always acquit themselves perfectly when they cover presidential elections, but one thing they have an unerring nose for is high political theater. A commission-sponsored debate between a major-party candidate and his opponent's empty chair would be too much to resist.
If it looks a bit unseemly for President Bush to be trying to wriggle out of the only three unscripted discussions of the future of the country that voters are likely to see between now and November, that's because it is. It has become a distasteful tradition in this country for incumbent presidents to reduce the already spare three-debate series that the commission usually sponsors to two, and to try to shorten the proposed 90-minute timeframe by a third to one hour.
Of course, while most candidates wait until they are incumbents to try to short-circuit the debate process, Bush started early. In the 2000 campaign he announced that he would skip two out of three debates sponsored by the commission in favor of what can only be called “debate-program-related activities” on Larry King Live and Meet the Press.
The commission got rolled by Bill Clinton in 1996 and by George H.W. Bush in 1988, both of whom agreed to only two debates; its three-debate schedule was saved in 2000 only after a massive display of public scorn forced the current President Bush to scrap his plan to go to the talk shows instead.
The problem here isn't just that campaigns are intent on wresting every shred of political advantage from presidential incumbency. Much of the fault lies with the debate commission itself, whose members have failed to capitalize on their significant moral authority as bipartisan promoters of vital political discourse.
A quick reminder for the members of the commission: The man seeking another four years in the nation's highest office is not doing you, or the American people, a favor by agreeing to show up for debates about the future of this country. President Bush is obligated to make his case to the voters and to face difficult questions about the difficult issues facing this country.
So far in this campaign, President Bush has thoroughly failed to meet that obligation -- and the members of the commission must know it. Every day he faces only pre-screened crowds whose loyalty oaths are on file somewhere in the Republican National Committee's headquarters. Given the circumstances, a few hours of honest debate aren't too much to ask.
Commission officials say they are unwilling to speak publicly about the discussions with the campaigns while negotiations are ongoing. But it's the negotiations that are the problem, and they ought to stop. The commission has the moral high ground here, and they need to use it.
Rob Garver is a freelance journalist living in Springfield, Virginia, and is currently studying at Georgetown Public Policy Institute.
