Room for a View

Undue Influence: The Bi-Partisan Stranglehold on the Debates

by Josh Robinson

Demonstrators at the LA Democratic convention protesting the exclusion of Ralph Nader from the presidential debates.

In an election year when both major party presidential candidates agree on many contentious issues, such as the war on drugs, the death penalty, international trade, and economic sanctions against countries such as Iraq and Cuba, the biggest debate so far has been about the debates.  Until Republican candidate George W. Bush agreed, less than three weeks prior to the first planned meeting between the candidates, to the schedule put forward by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), it appeared that there might not be any presidential debates for the first time since 1972.
The CPD was founded in 1987 to institutionalize the planning of debates, which had previously been left up to the vagaries of each individual campaign. The organization purports to exist for the purpose of ensuring, in its own words, “that debates, as a permanent part of every general election, provide the best possible information to viewers and listeners,”1 about the candidates for the presidency. A closer analysis, however, shows influence by special interests is possibly undermining this mission. Before delving into this issue, a brief history of public debates between presidential contenders is in order. The modern era of televised presidential debates began in 1960 with the debates between Richard Nixon, then-vice president and Republican nominee, and John F. Kennedy, then-US senator from Massachusetts and the Democratic nominee.
There were no debates after this until 1976. This was also the first year the League of Women Voters sponsored the debates after it “waged a successful nationwide citizen’s campaign to pressure presidential nominees Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford to debate.”2 Since then, there have been debates in each Presidential election cycle.
The CPD, which came into being only a year before, has controlled the debates since 1988. This was the year the “candidates’ demands to control the debates in all but name prompted the League to pull out of the process. Since that time, general election presidential debates have been sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, the organization created by the Democratic and Republican parties.”3
All ten debates since 1988 have been sponsored by the CPD, as will the three that will take place this election year, yet very little has appeared in the mainstream media about the special interest groups that have been the guiding force for an organization which holds complete control over the debate planning process.
The most obvious group of these special interests includes both the numerous corporate sponsors of the CPD and the individual debates themselves. A quick glance at the CPD’s Web site, www.debates.org shows that several major corporations, some of which make large donations to one or both of the major parties and their candidates, are lurking behind the commission.
The homepage of this site contains links to such large companies as AT&T, Sun Microsystems, and 3Com, a manufacturer of computer software and equipment owning a controlling stake in Palm, which they spun off as the Palm Series of personal digital assistants. These companies are listed as sponsors of the CPD’s web presence. One click of the mouse leads surfers to another screen complete with these links, as well as those of the debate sponsors themselves. The sponsors include Anheuser-Busch, US Airways, and once again, 3Com. Other companies which have sponsored debates in the past are: Lucent Technologies, Philip Morris Companies Inc., Sara Lee Corporation, Sprint, Ford Motor Company, Hallmark, IBM, J.P. Morgan & Co., and Prudential.
Among the sponsors of this year’s presidential debates, one finds many contributors of large amounts of soft money to both the Democrats and Republicans. Common Cause, a campaign finance watchdog organization, lists AT&T as the overall leader of such gifts, donating $2,934,008 between January 1, 1999-June 30, 2000 alone. Anheuser-Busch also makes the list with $813,806 in donations over the same period.
AT&T also tops the list of donors who gave more than $100,000 to both parties over the same period. In its case, each party got more than $1,000,000 of the total. Anheuser-Busch and US Airways, which gave $110,250 to the Democrats and $269,870 to the GOP, also make the list. In addition, AT&T leads the list of GOP donors with over $1.8 million given. Anheuser-Busch also makes the GOP list, and both companies appear on the list of biggest Democratic givers.
The individual debates also have sponsors. According to Danny Slaton, a Boston activist and one of the founders of www.demockery2000.org, a website belonging to a group protesting the corporate/major party influence over the October 3 presidential debate in that city, the following profit-oriented institutions are among the sponsors of that event: Fidelity, Fleet Bank, Liberty Mutual, NSTAR (Boston Edison), Citizens Bank, Boston Capital, and State Street Bank.
The second, and possibly more insidious group of special interests involved has only two members: the Democrat and Republican parties. Although the CPD claims to be nonpartisan, closer scrutiny of the people involved in this organization reveals that it may be more accurately described as bipartisan.
Even before its creation, both Democratic and Republican partisans advocated the Commission. The CPD Web site contains links to excerpts of two studies that back this up. As the Web site states, “the Commission on Presidential Debates was created after two national study groups issued reports on the presidential debate process.”4
The first of these reports, by a Georgetown University-sponsored organization called the Commission on National Elections (CNE), came out in early 1986. The report by the CNE, which the CPD describes as “a bipartisan panel … co-chaired by Melvin R. Laird, former Secretary of Defense [in the Richard M. Nixon administration], and Robert S. Strauss, former Democratic National Committee Chair,” urged “the two parties to assume responsibility for sponsoring and otherwise ensuring that presidential candidate joint appearances are made a permanent and integral part of the presidential election process.” 5, 6 The membership of the panel making this recommendation also included such major-party notables as: Lloyd Bentsen, Wendell Ford, Vernon Jordan, Charles Robb, Robert Rubin, John Sears, and John Sununu.
The second group, sponsored by Harvard University, issued its paper in 1987. “For Great Debates: A New Plan for Future Presidential TV Debates,” produced for that group by the Twentieth Century Fund, recommended that the “Democratic and Republican parties should establish a bipartisan Presidential Debates Organization now to administer the 1988 debates.”7 This organization also counted among its membership many prominent Democrats and Republicans, including Ron Brown, Walter Mondale, Roger Allen Moore, and David F. Norcross.
Both of these organizations were, and still are, referred to as bipartisan, while the presidential debate commission they urged into existence is purported to be nonpartisan. This fine semantic point belies one of the primary complaints opponents of the CPD make: that it systematically excludes candidates, and therefore ideas, not supported by either the Democratic or Republican parties.
The Twentieth Century Fund foresaw this criticism. Another suggestion its report made states that the “question of third-party candidates should not undermine the goal of institutionalizing debates between the Democratic and Republican Party candidates. (That question can be considered, in all its complexity, in the context of a guaranteed minimum of debates between the major party candidates.)”8 While this suggestion has thus far been realized, the next one on the list, that third party candidates be given free TV time and other compensations if they are not included, has not.
The CPD’s criteria for inclusion of third party candidates in the debates are even more stringent than those imposed by the federal government, which views five percent support in the previous election as qualifying for major party status. In contrast, the CPD requires, in addition to meeting constitutional and ballot requirements for being a qualified candidate with a mathematical chance of winning, that a candidate average fifteen percent support, on average, in the following polls: ABC News/Washington Post, CBS News/New York Times, NBC News/Wall Street Journal, CNN/USA Today/Gallup, and Fox News/Opinion Dynamics.
Many of the companies producing the polls the CPD uses in its decision making process are also big sources of soft money for both major parties. Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC, appears on Common Cause’s list of dual donors, with more than $250,000 of its money going to each party, for soft money contributions totaling $619,548.
Not everyone in the two major parties, however, is satisfied with this arrangement. Representative Jessie Jackson, Jr. (D-IL) has introduced legislation that would legislate inclusion of eligible candidates with adequate ballot access (enough to make a victory in the electoral college mathematically possible) if they were receiving five percent support in national polls or more than half of the American people, according to opinion polls, want that candidate to debate.
Changing the criteria in this way would have a dramatic effect. In the current election cycle, they would at least guarantee the inclusion of nominees Ralph Nader of the Green party and Pat Buchanan of (one faction of) the Reform party, which qualifies this year as a major party after Ross Perot received 8% of the ballots in the 1996 general election. Nader has polled above 5% in national polls, although his numbers have slipped of late. At any rate, a recent Fox News poll found a whopping 64% of those polled to be in favor of the inclusion of both Nader and Buchanan in the CPD debates.
The minor parties certainly have not been silent on this issue. In a letter to network executives, Nader pointed out that viewership would likely be up for a debate involving third-party candidates. “The 1992 presidential debates,” he wrote, “were watched by a record-breaking 90 million viewers. Why? Because third-party candidate Ross Perot was included in those debates. Presidential voter turnout went up in ’92, reversing a 20-year downward trend. In 1996, the two parties learned their lesson and excluded Perot. The result? Only 41 million viewers watched.”
This could be an indicator that the American people believe that they get the best information when the debates include minor party candidates. The Commission on Presidential Debates claims that its mission is to provide the best possible information to the voters, yet reality clearly shows that its major supporters would be hurt by the inclusion of third party candidates. This glaring fact, combined with the reality that minor party candidates such as Nader and Buchanan are being excluded from this year’s presidential debates presents, at the very least, the appearance of a conflict of interest.
Nader and Buchanan, for example, both oppose free trade agreements such as North American Foreign Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). This opposition would hurt corporate profits in the long run and runs against the position taken by both major party candidates Bush and Gore. Both Nader and Libertarian candidate Harry Browne oppose the “war on drugs” both Democrats and Republicans have invested tremendously in over the past 30 years. Some corporations, such as those in the tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceutical industries stand to lose large sums of money if newly legalized drugs were to cut into their market share.
Whether or not collusion to keep third party candidates out of the debates occurs between the candidates from the parties which have been in power for the past century and a half of American history and the corporations that fund them with millions of dollars in soft money contributions, the possibility of impropriety is obvious. With voter turnout flirting all-time lows in many recent elections, it is clear that a majority of this year’s presidential voters have made up their minds and want to see third party candidates participate in the debates, as the Fox News poll indicates. While there is no guarantee that such participation in the presidential debates would propel a new party into national power, the voters want those parties to have a chance to air dissenting views on important issues. If the CPD wants to serve the voters as it claims, perhaps it should start by listening to them.