He’s ready to face the nation

NEW YORK — You’ll have to forgive CBS News’ Bob Schieffer for indulging in a baseball metaphor. It’s that time of year, for one thing. For another, the task before him actually has “taken on a last-game-of-the-World Series atmosphere,” as he puts it.

There will be two other guys onstage with Schieffer when he moderates the final debate in Tempe, Ariz., on Wednesday, and chances are the performances of President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, will get most of the attention.

But make no mistake -- Schieffer, the veteran political correspondent and host of “Face the Nation,” will be the man in the power seat.

The stakes could hardly be higher; with no clear winner in last week’s debate and polls showing an exceptionally tight race going into the Nov. 2 election, every question Schieffer poses has the potential for tipping the balance of the contest.

Add to that the media’s own role in the campaign -- with Schieffer’s network prominently embroiled in one of the controversies that has cropped up this election season -- and you have a late-inning matchup with dramatic potential.

And believe it or not, a rookie going into the game.

Although Schieffer, 67, has covered politics since Sen. George S. McGovern’s 1972 campaign against President Nixon, this will be his first shot at moderating a presidential debate.

“This thing came completely out of the blue for me,” said Schieffer, who was “sitting at home reading a book” when the call came. “I don’t know why they chose me ... but I’m not only just honored, I’m very excited about it,” particularly because the public is paying more attention to the debates this year, unlike in previous campaigns.

He has thrown himself into the preparations with diligence -- despite all the distractions.

There was the 50-pound box waiting for him one day at his Washington, D.C., office. In it were about 11,000 questions that some group -- he said he couldn’t remember which one -- wanted him to consider posing on the air. He read only a sampling before he had to move on.

Then there was the time-consuming false start. He was first told that he would be moderating a debate on foreign policy, so he plunged into interviews with experts, spending more than two hours at one point with former Middle East negotiator Dennis B. Ross. Finally, he had a list of 75 questions. He got up the next morning to find that the debate topics had been switched and that he would be handling domestic issues instead.

“So I started over again,” he said.

One day, his office received 1,500 e-mails offering suggestions. Schieffer again is winnowing his list to 75, but expects he’ll have time for only about 20.

In a media landscape that has tended toward the bombastic and self-aggrandizing in recent years, Schieffer projects an old-school style -- shrewd, serious, self-effacing. It’s a safe bet that none of those 20 questions will be of the trick or “gotcha” variety.

“I don’t like them, and I’m not going to use them,” Schieffer said by phone from Washington on Friday. “I want to get them to say what they do mean and then we can hold that up to some scrutiny.” The broad areas of inquiry aren’t hard to figure out, he said: “healthcare costs, Social Security reform, homeland security measures, taxes, the deficit,” and, of course, jobs and the economy.

Moderating a presidential debate is a high-wire act, although the skills required may be largely invisible to the viewer, said Jay Rosen, chairman of New York University’s journalism faculty. “Staying in control of the debate, staying in control of the broadcast, knowing where you are in the 90 minutes, alternating the questions.... It’s such a highly charged situation you really can’t have more riding on an hour and a half of television than that,” he said.

ABC News’ Charles Gibson, who moderated the second presidential debate Friday, marveled at the complexity of the campaigns’ rules of engagement -- all 32 pages’ worth. Gibson, in a post-debate debriefing on “Nightline,” noted that the rules included “50-some lines devoted to a coin flip. Just imagine in your own mind. Can you think possibly of any way to write 52 lines about a coin flip?”

Schieffer’s other predecessors as moderators this year are two PBS journalists: Jim Lehrer, who presided over the first presidential debate, and Gwen Ifill, who moderated the vice-presidential matchup.

Lehrer declined to comment on how he prepared. But he gave pointers to Ifill and had a lengthy conversation with Schieffer.

Lehrer’s best idea, Ifill said, dealt with follow-up questions, which the moderators technically aren’t allowed to ask. (Instead, a candidate gets two minutes to answer a question, his opponent gets 90 seconds to rebut, then both get 30 seconds for another back and forth.)

Lehrer’s idea, Ifill said, was that “instead of treating each question as a brand-new question, treat question No. 2 as a follow-up to 1,” as in “new question, same topic,” leaving the candidates less room to wiggle out of an answer. Of course, she said, “You could do that for 90 minutes and still not get an answer to the question, but at least you felt you had given it enough of a whack. And the viewing audience is smart enough to know when the question is not being answered.”

Schieffer said he’ll likely use Lehrer’s method of keeping track of whose turn it is by holding eye contact with each candidate as he asks a question, just to etch in his memory who’s at bat. Then again, he said, “If I ask the wrong guy, I don’t think it’s a capital offense.”

Beyond all the political and technical considerations of presiding over the final debate, Schieffer has the additional pressure of representing CBS. Some conservative activists mounted a campaign to remove him as moderator, claiming the network is biased because of its “60 Minutes” report on Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service in the 1970s, which relied on now-discredited documents and is the subject of an independent investigation. While the White House has said publicly that it has no problem with Schieffer as moderator, he nonetheless finds himself in a position of standard-bearer for a network trying to regain credibility.

“If I thought for a minute that either President Bush or John Kerry would be uncomfortable with me there, or that either thought I couldn’t do this in a fair way ... I would step aside, but they have not said that,” Schieffer said. “Obviously, I will make sure I do a fair and objective job. How could I not? With this many people watching television, if I took a one-sided approach to this, my career would be completed at the end of the debate.”

For all the pressure, Schieffer said he’s “not particularly nervous about it.” Continuing that World Series metaphor, he said: “When it’s the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, and there are two men out, you want to be the guy up there.”