No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates.

• Author: Friedenberg, Robert V.
• Position: Book Review

No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates. By George Farah. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004; pp. vii, +223. $14.95

George Farah is founder and executive director of Open Debates, a Washington-based nonprofit nonpartisan organization committed to reforming the presidential debate process. The first step in reforming that process, according to Farah, is the creation of a "Citizen's Debate Commission--composed of national civic leaders from the left, center, and right of the political spectrum." The Citizen's Debate Commission exists, although it has not yet gained the national prominence it seeks.

In the second step of reform, "civic groups [would] successfully organize a massive public education campaign to expose the antidemocratic practices of the CPD [Commission on Presidential Debates], making the organization unsuitable for debate sponsorship" (p. 172). This book and the publicity that has attended it represent the beginning of this second step: The author has written a highly critical polemic against the Commission on Presidential Debates and many of its practices in sponsoring the presidential debates.

Farah offers five broad indictments of the Commission. In the overview first chapter, he argues that the Commission "is not the honorable institution it claims to be." Rather, Farah alleges, "the CPD is a corporate-funded, bipartisan cartel that secretly awards control of the presidential debates to the Republican and Democratic candidates, perpetuating domination of a two-party system and restricting subject matters of political discourse" (p. 7). Farah stresses that the bipartisan nature of the CPD precludes third party candidates who might, by virtue of debate performance, become viable threats to the Democratic and Republican candidates. Moreover, the fact that the Commission receives corporate donations, claims Farah, provides it with "an additional, albeit subtle incentive to exclude viable third-party candidates"; in the past 30 years most third party candidates who have been on a sufficient number of state ballots to win an electoral college majority "have been sharply critical of corporate power" (p. 11).

Farah finds that the CPD is not at all independent. The Commission consistently yields to the demands of the two major party candidates on virtually all questions, including those involving third party participation, debate formats, moderators, timing of the debates...