Junior, three writings and kenneth wallick. This marks their first joint on camera appearance ahead of the 20 general election. Studied thens have legendary douglas debates which were not president ial debates, but for eight u. S. Senate seat. The candidates met facetoface seven times that year, and the subsequent election was won by stephen douglas. Stage for set the abraham lincolns campaign for the presidency two years ago in 1860. 102 years after those debates on september 26 1960, at the cbs studios in chicago, senator john f. Kennedy and Vice PresidentRichard Nixon came together in the firstever general election president ial debate. A televised affair that changed the nature of politics. Strick kennedy and mr. Nixon debated four times in 1960 and john f. Kennedy went on to win the presidency by a slim margin. Looking back at the Campaign Years later, mr. Nixon said i should have remembered that a picture is worth a thousand words. Those debates were sponsored by the three Major Networks at the time, cbs, nbc and abc. Years, theak of 16 general election president ial debates returned in 1976, sponsored by the league of women voters. Sponsorue continued to the debates in 1980 and 1984. In 19 87, the commission on president ial debates was established to insurer for the been if it of the american electorate, the general election debates between or among the leading candidates for the offices of president and Vice President of the United States are a permanent part of the elect oral process. And independent 501 c 3 organization, the cpd indicates it does not receive any funding from the government, Political Party come a Political Action committee or candidate. The commission has sponsored or produced all general election residential debates since 1988. Dubbed the super bowl of american democracy, the first of three federal election debates, plus one Vice President ial debates will kick off four weeks from tonight on on tuesday, september 29. While there is fanfare surrounding them, the debates themselves continue to serve a vital role of informing the electorate of the choice before them. It is a tall order, and one that our guests are tasked with overseeing. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. We will accept questions from our online audience. I will ask as many as time permits to submit a question. I am pleased to say that in the hasup, Lindsay Underwood received 300 questions for National Press club members and others viewing today. Here we go. With four weeks to go to the first debate and an extraordinary set of circumstances, frank farren your cofounder of the commission on president ial debates. You also served as chairman of the republic will Republican National committee until 1989 which encompassed much of the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Talk about the challenges of 2020 versus what you have dealt with in the past. Can you compare this to anything you have seen before . No. Coronavirus has thrown us a curveball, as it has everyone else in every walk of life. The way most of us have to live our lives. We announced the dates and locations for this use debates in october. We had no idea we would run into what we have run into. Originally the faculties as it was originally supposed to start on the 29th at the university of notre dame. About howw anything Notre Dame University has approached this semester, they were set to start around august without athrough break until thanksgiving and then send the kids home, no one going home during the interim, and along here, we were going to come with the debate on september 29 with between 3000 and 5000 reporters from all over the world. It just did not fit into the situation. We were very fortunate that the Cleveland Clinic and case western reserve stepped up. We had the same problem with michigan, and that is why the town hall meeting has been moved from she can down to miami. We are also working closely with the Cleveland Clinic. They are going to be our advisors as to social distancing with regard to the candidates, staff, audience, and so forth, and the safety protocols that have to be followed. It is a Different Group different world we are walking into, but we think we are as prepared as we can be under the circumstances. Michael lets get a few important preliminaries taken care of before we enter a deep dive into 2020 with our member questions. Frank, talk about the differences between the primary debates that we saw this spring and the general election president ial debates. Andk i know ken and dot all of us know because we run into this all the time because it is very hard for most americans to identify how different they are. As you know, the primary debates are fundamentally put on by the networks. They have advertisements. Ways, want the crowd to clap and make noise and so forth, and they have advertisements that stop debate going forward. We go 90 minutes without any break. No advertisements, no ads with our debates. Ken and i will be out on stage prior to the debate asking the audience to please be quiet. There is no clapping, no whistling, and so forth. I always tell them that there will be somewhere between 50 million and 150 Million People watching, and it is unfair for you if you are in the audience to interfere with what they are sing and so forth. And we have been very fortunate. We have done 30 debates as of right now since we started in 1988 and only once or twice there has been that difference. As we said, we think we are as ready as we are going to be. But there is nothing like the debates, nothing like the primary debates. Michael dorothy ridings, you have suggested it is ok for me to call you dot for the rest of this conversation. Dot please do. Michael and i will. You are a longtime journalist, newspaper reporter an editor and later publisher of a daily paper in florida. You qualify for a National Press club membership. You also served as president of the league of women voters during that period of time that the organization sponsored the president ial debates. I would like to you i would like you to talk a bit about the candidate Selection Process for the debates. , that has been one among continuing debates those who also would prefer to be a contender in the debates. We have probably faced more legal challenges than that, and it is of personal interest to that the basiced reason is you cannot have everybody to run for president in a debate. You will not have a debate. Were talking thousands of candidates, declarations of candidacy, so to get it down to a true debate, there has to be some limitation on, as the league put it and of the commission puts it, voter interest and support, to demonstrate that they have a significant opportunity to end up on the winning side in the election. And that has been a problem and always will be, i suspect. I cannot think of where it would not be. The commission now adopted the criteria that the league of women voters used and developed from the earliest years, beginning in 1976, which were difficult, and that is why i see the commission and the league as good partners in this, because the league tried a lot of things that did not work, and there were things that did, and we could all pick up on those that really did work. But you put your finger on the one that is really the most bothersome every debate year. Michael based on the number of questions we got on that subject, we will have an opportunity to talk a little bit more about that over the course of this hour. Lets move over to the moderators as we cover a lot of the overview material right now. How are the moderators selected, and would you like to announce them right now, live . frank is going to speak to that, but let me just point out that the league tried for years theet the candidates debates sponsored by the league, to get the candidates to agree to a single moderator instead of a panel. That is one of the lessons that we tried and tried and tried. And the commission having much more political depth and clout, they were able to make that happen. Frank the question of moderators, if it had never come up, the question would not exist. Because in 1984, the league had allowed the two candidates, reagan and mondale, to have a veto over anyone who is suggested to be either the moderator or on the panel. Usually in those days it is the moderator and three reporters who ask the questions. With vtecournalists were vetoed by the two candidates. As a result of that, two commissioners were created, when part ofsis when it was georgetown university, and the other was Kennedy School at harvard. Both commissions were composed of journalists, of college professors, some candidates, some politicians, etc. , and they studied the question of how we can do a better job of electing our president. Both of them independently came to the conclusion that there should be created a new separate entity that exists for one purpose and one purpose only, to ensure that the general election debates are held every four years. At that time i was chairman of the Republican National committee, and paul kirk was chairman of the Democratic National committee. We got together, and the net result was we created the commission on president ial debate, and we have done all 30 debates since 1988. One of the problems that we always have is result oftors as a the nixing of things, we have taken the position that we cannot allow the candidates to pick the moderators. So we spend a great deal of time, particularly over the last year before the debates, looking at those people, journalists who are on television or what they are writing, to try and find some and who can strike the balance of fairness that we are looking for and realizing that your job as a moderator of a president ial debate is much different than a journalist interviewing a candidate. If a journalist is interviewing a candidate and asks a question and they get an answer that is different from something that candidate said a week later, the journalist will say, wait a minute, youre changing your position, you said this a week ago. That is not the job of a moderator of a president ial debate. It is the job of the moderator to facilitate interchange between the candidates, to have them debate, so you want the other candidate, if he or she is up on what is going on, to say, wait a minute, you changed your position. It is a very important distinction, so we work very hard, and we will be announcing the debate moderators this week. Ken i would only add that the commission has grown with experience and changed with experience. In terms of the criteria for candidates who appear on stage, 1992, 1996, in there was criteria that we later saw as being more subjective. So those criteria were then changed starting in 2000, which was more transparent and certainly less subjective. Too, they moderators, the commission learned it was probably best to have a single moderator for each debate because that changed the focus to the moderators, rather than to those on the stage, the candidates themselves. So you will probably see four erators, one for the press Vice President ial debate and three for the president ial debate, which we think focuses attention more on the candidates than on the moderators themselves. Frank the other difference ken was going, starting in the first debate in, i guess, it was 2012, it had to and the moderator in the first and last debates, which will happen this year, will divide 90 minutes into six 15minute segments, and it will announce three or four days before the debate what each segment will concentrate on. Health care, law and order, foreign policy. What happens is the moderator, at the beginning of the 15minute time, will ask a short question that each of them get, and then the moderator has the ability to drill down and really get to where these candidates are on the issues, rather than having them up there with their one or twominute diatribe that they worked out during the campaign. So that is a very big difference, along with the difference that ken noted of going to a single moderator rather than a panel of reporters. Minute toack for a the pandemic we are dealing with. It sounds like there are no changes to date in the formats of the debates for this year as a result of the pandemic. I am curious as to whether that , just as auid at all result of what we do not know might happened. Frank it is very, very clear with regard to the townhall meeting, for those people who have seen the townhall meeting in the past, you know we have 50 or 100 people, almost like a theater in the round, sitting on bleachers with the candidates and moderator in the middle where they ask the questions. It is clear with social distancing and other protocols, we are not going to be able to do that. That is something we are really going to have to listen to the Cleveland Clinic as to how many people that we can have as part of that group of citizens selected to be on the stage and what the distancing is. So it is very, very clear there that were going to have some changes from what we have done in the past. With regard to the other debates with the candidates on the stage, they are almost they are always more than six feet apart historically with the moderator in the middle. Again, the Cleveland Clinic, were going to look to them and the state protocols. Were going to different states, and different states have certain protocols. We are going to have to comply with all of that. But at this point in time, the only significant difference i think that we expect is going to be with that townhall meeting. Add, the sizeld of the audience. Frank absolutely. Ken it will be considerably smaller than in the past. Michael ken, thank you for that. Ken wollack, you are the longtime former president of the National Democratic institute, a Nongovernmental Organization dedicated to advancing democracy worldwide. And your work in american politics goes all the way back to 1972 when you served on the National Staff of George Mcgoverns campaign for the presidency. Ken, people may not realize the global reach of the president ial debates, as well as the global onreach of the Commission President ial debates. Talk to us a bit about the work that is being done internationally, particularly among emerging market sees. Important as the debates have been in the United States and really have become a permanent feature of our electoral process, debates have become have had an even greater impact overseas in new and emerging democracies, particularly in countries in postconflict political environments. And the debates have played a very, very Important Role in the transition process in these countries for three reasons. Number one, it has leveled the Playing Field in countries where there has been a dominant little party. Secondly, it helps focus the candidates on the Public Policy issues, rather than personality. And three, it has lowered the often atrhetoric political rallies because citizens see the two or more major candidates vying for office shaking hands i assume now in the covid period it will be elbow bumps but they see the candidates shaking hands, and it promotes civility in the campaign process. It has had a huge impact in these situations, and it has influenced the way people behave and the way people vote. That thelt of the Work Commission has done in cooperation with the National Democratic institute, ndi, we, together, jointly have helped organize more than 400 debates around theries world. And as a result of that effort, there is now a coalition of debate organizers from 38 countries called Debates International that help each other in terms of organizing debates. So last year during the debates , where virtually all of the 7 million registered voters watched the debate on television, it was not only the commission and ndi that was assisting that effort, but it was also the debate organizers from chile, mexico, and jamaica that were also engaged in assisting. So now there is a sort of International Network that helps each other organize what has become an important feature, particularly in these countries. Michael i am not sure it was lost on anybody that you set promoting civility in the campaign process. Is that an issue here now with what the rest of the world sees in our own debates . I will expand that to the primary debates, too, because those were pretty raucous. Talk about that a little bit, and i will throw that out to each of you. Ken, do you want to start . Of well, frank made mention this earlier, i think because the audience were actual participants in the debate, i think it contributes to an ironment that is more frank the primary debates. Ken talking about the primary debates. Because they were actual participants in the debates in terms of their approval or disapproval of what the candidates were saying, and because you had, you know, up to 16 candidates in the primary moree, it resulted in a raucous process, i think. And because you had many more moderators, as well. And i think, and i cannot theict, but in the past, president ial debates have been a little more dignified in that regard because the audiences are not to say painting, not a participant in the process. There is traditionally only one moderator, and it has a and i think people will see that these debates will be quite different than the primaries. Michael dot, frank, do you want to add anything . Dot i totally agree with ken. Civility, i think that is an issue, but our general election debates, both the league and commission have put a