Real debates

The presidential debates are a sham. Here's how to fix them.

Ralph Nader is right. The presidential-debate system is a sham. Rather than fostering genuine discussion of the issues, the debates perpetuate the duopoly of the two major parties. Add to that the ugly fact that the debates are sponsored by corporate giants such as AT&T, Philip Morris, and Anheuser-Busch, and it becomes clear that the only way other voices will have a chance to be heard is to chuck the status quo and start over again.

Nader, the Green Party's candidate for president, took an important step recently by filing a lawsuit against the federal government. Pat Buchanan, the likely Reform Party nominee, is also mounting a legal challenge. There is a precedent for Nader and Buchanan's stand. In 1998, the Federal Election Commission's own counsel found that the 1996 debates, by excluding minor-party candidates, constituted illegal campaign contributions to the two major parties. Not surprisingly, he was overruled by the commissioners -- that is, by appointees chosen by the Democratic and Republican Parties. In Massachusetts, the Libertarian Party filed a similar complaint that same year regarding debates for state office; that complaint also went nowhere.

Since 1988, the presidential debates have been run by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), whose co-leaders, Paul Kirk and Frank Fahrenkopf, are former chairmen of the Democratic and Republican National Committees, respectively. The rules they have devised for the 2000 debates seem designed to ensure that the stage will be occupied by no one other than Al Gore and George W. Bush. To qualify, a candidate must register at least 15 percent in the polls by September. "Our role is not to jump-start your campaign and all of a sudden make you competitive," Kirk told reporters. "It's not a perfect analogy, but in sports, people understand you don't make the playoffs unless you start to accumulate enough wins to show you're competitive."

How arrogant. How oblivious to the pernicious effects of the media-political complex. The public can't learn about candidates unless it is exposed to them. That can't happen unless the media report on them. And the media don't report on them, except as occasional antic diversions, unless they are seen as having a genuine chance of winning. Yet today's also-ran can become tomorrow's winner. And even candidates who fail to become competitive can have an important impact on an election. Consider the case of Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, an independent. In September 1998, when he was a member of the Reform Party, he was running at about 10 percent in the polls. If Minnesota had adopted the CPD's rules, he would have been excluded from the gubernatorial debates. Instead, he was invited to take the stage. In a stunning upset, he beat both the Democratic and Republican nominees that November.

Or consider Reform Party founder Ross Perot. In 1992, his poll numbers were so high that the CPD had to invite him. His ceaseless harangue about the deficit arguably set the stage for eventual winner Bill Clinton's deficit-reduction package, which helped fuel the economic boom. Yet in 1996 the commission disinvited Perot, since he was running below 15 percent in the polls. It mattered not a whit that Perot had actually won 19 percent of the vote four years earlier, had qualified for $30 million in federal matching funds, and was on the ballot in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. As a result, no one was on stage to interrupt the Clinton-Dole snoozefest -- just as the major parties wanted.

The televised debates, which draw 60 million to 100 million viewers, should introduce the public to the candidates, not reward the major-party nominees for their name-
recognition numbers. Here, then, are a few ideas for reforming the debates.

* Get rid of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is nothing but a tool of the two major parties. Return debate management to the League of Women Voters, which used to run them, or to some other nonpartisan group. Pay for the debates with public money and forbid corporate sponsorship.

* Invite every candidate to the first of the three presidential debates, provided he or she has qualified for the ballot in enough states to be able to win the presidency, at least in theory. This in itself is a daunting requirement, necessitating hundreds of thousands of signatures. In 2000, that would probably mean five candidates at the first debate: Gore, Bush, Nader, Buchanan, and the Libertarian Party's Harry Browne. Five is hardly an unwieldy number, and the presence of Nader, Browne, and Buchanan would guarantee a lively discussion on issues such as free trade, political reform, and the proper limits of government -- issues that won't even be on the table if the debate is limited to Bush and Gore.

* Use national polls to eliminate the non-contenders, but only after the first debate. In addition, the threshold should be lowered from 15 percent to five percent -- the same percentage candidates must win to qualify for federal matching funds.

Commentators regularly lament the disconnection between politics and the public, a disconnection documented by declining voter turnout and widespread cynicism. The combination of corporate power and major-party cooperation to crush minority voices only deepens that division. One way to ameliorate that is to inject a little democracy into the democratic process.

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