Critics besiege presidential debate commission

The Commission on Presidential Debates is under siege by separate groups aiming to bust the commission’s long monopoly on how presidential debates are conducted and which candidates make the stage.

The efforts to overhaul the 2016 general election debates — which are taking place as the GOP primary debate season is dominating headlines — are moving on different tracks. A bipartisan group of leading campaign strategists plans to take their message of dissatisfaction to the public this fall while another group, called Level the Playing Field, has run full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal attacking the commission and its members.


In late June, Level the Playing Field filed a lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission alleging the FEC, in collusion with the commission, has illegally limited the debates to candidates from the two major parties. The group also wants to be allowed to sue the commission directly, which they’re not allowed to do currently.

The bipartisan group began laying the groundwork for its push by releasing a report last month that floats possible alternative formats. Critics of the debate commission — who include many presidential campaign veterans — complain that the commission is autocratic, captive to TV networks, and hasn’t modernized debate formats much since it started holding them in 1988.

The group charges that the commission’s inaction has led to staid, boring debates that become more about the moderator than what the candidates have to say and don’t actually help the American voter decide.

Organized by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and helmed by former Romney senior advisor Beth Myers and former Obama communications director Anita Dunn, the group also includes Hillary Clinton chief strategist and pollster Joel Benenson, Stuart Stevens, Ron Klain, Charles Black, and Robert Barnett — all participating in personal capacities, not as representatives of 2016 campaigns.

Among the proposed reforms: eliminating on-site audiences except for the town-hall debate; bringing in moderators besides journalists; and adopting a chess clock model for some debates where candidates have an equal amount of time to speak, instead of being constantly interrupted by a moderator saying they have only a few seconds left.

“There’s now an alternate format for the candidates, whoever they may be, a year from now,” said election lawyer Ben Ginsberg, who’s negotiated debate details for Mitt Romney and George W. Bush.

“If [the debates are] not continuously made better, I’m worried that they could cease happening and that would be a really bad thing,” Myers said. “If the format of the debates doesn’t evolve, and the debates don’t attract enough viewing voters, over time … the candidates might stop participating.”

Dunn and Myers said they were optimistic that the commission would look at their proposed changes seriously and adopt some of them. But if the commission doesn’t pay heed, members of the group said, the report could be a blueprint for how to set up alternative debates that bypass the commission.

“It’s not like Capital Records and they own the rights to the Beatles and no one else can touch the Beatles or the concerts,” said group member Michael Sheehan, who’s helped Democratic candidates with debate planning since 1988.

Sheehan, a former Shakespearean play producer, said the group’s recommendations would help voters see the candidates speak and present their ideas, instead of just watching them recite heavily rehearsed answers to predictable questions.

“If it was good enough for Kennedy-Nixon, it should be good enough for us,” he said of hosting debates in a studio, adding that debates had become too gladiator-like. “Instead of big rock [music] productions, let’s make it acoustics, let’s see how these candidates really are, stripped down to the absolute bare.”

Mike McCurry, co-chair of the commission and a former Clinton press secretary, said the Annenberg report had made “a lot of very important points and have a lot of good ideas,” and the commission is in the process of looking at all suggestions for the 2016 debates. The commission usually decides on site selection first in the fall, and then format in the spring and the announcement of moderators in the late spring.

But he said that the report failed to give “us enough credit for the format changes that we made in 2012” when the debates set aside blocks of time devoted to various issues. McCurry said while the changes may have been “incremental,” he said they had made “some very important” ones since 1988, such as moving away from a panel of journalists to a single moderator.

“There’s a sense that every four years the commission gets more and more imperious in terms of how they deal with the campaigns,” said a Democratic campaign veteran. “The commission has kind of decided that they were congressionally-chartered and constitutionally-protected and enacted by God to make decisions.”

One fundamental concern of the group is how moderators are chosen — and their behavior in the chair. A particular sticking point: the amount of time networks spend lobbying the campaigns to try to get their stars picked as moderators.

Instead of the risk of TV journalists seeking to use the debates as personal platforms, the group suggested bringing in distinguished individuals who might make equally effective moderators: retired judges, print journalists and university presidents.

In 2012, Republicans were furious when CNN’s Candy Crowley sought to fact-check Mitt Romney in the middle of a debate when he made a claim on how President Obama had described the Benghazi attack.

The group wants to avoid similar moments going forward and believes that the moderators’ role shouldn’t be journalistic in nature but merely to ask well-thought out questions and then let the candidates hold each other accountable.

Having Sunday-show style questions is “actually not what these debates are for,” said Dunn. “It’s for the candidates to hold each other’s feet to the fire. That’s kind of the philosophical difference here. Mitt Romney and Barack Obama should be challenging each other, not the moderator.”

Another top worry of debate reformers is that with millennials watching less TV in general, only young political junkies will tune in rather than a broader segment who would be most helped by seeing 90 minutes of the candidates going head to head. The idea is to make debates more social-media friendly, and to explore ways to bring YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix into the fold.

“Are we right there at the top of technology?” asked Frank Fahrenkopf, the commission’s co-chair and a former RNC chairman. “I’m not sure that we are there.” But he said that the commission works every year with Facebook, YouTube and other tech companies to get the debates seen by as many people on as many platforms as possible.

McCurry said the commission also recognized the need for moderators to better reflect diversity in America and appeal more to younger people — many of whom have been streaming debates online, rather than watching the debates on television.

Introducing new moderators into the mix may not be enough to assuage critics, however. One complaint is that the commission has become calcified, with Fahrenkopf and executive director Janet Brown running the CPD since its inception.

Fahrenkopf acknowledged he and Brown had been there a while but said they offered valuable experience that has led to debates going off without a hitch since the commission started.

“Is there an age limit?” he said.

At the heart of Level the Playing Field’s efforts is a different grievance — the difficulty of getting third party candidates on the debate stage. Last week the group sent a letter to the commission proposing an “independent primary” that would consist of televised events by qualified independents and lead to the winner getting on the regular debate stage.

“The Commission on Presidential Debates is there to create a rule that does not have a predetermined outcome, and they are doing exactly the opposite, and that’s what we’ll be fighting legally over,” said financier Peter Ackerman, who’s behind Level the Playing Field. “There would [be] a lot of people who would be willing to run if they knew they had a chance to be in the debates.”