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New Orleans rejected for presidential debate

Section: Politics

Bruce Alpert

New Orleans lost out in the competition to host one of the 2008 presidential debates Monday after the commission that selects the sites decided that the city has not sufficiently recovered from Hurricane Katrina to handle such a major event.
STAFF PHOTO BY ELIOT KAMENITZAnne Milling of Women of the Storm, holds a press conference regarding the rejection of New Orleans hosting a presidential debate.

Backers of the New Orleans debate, who had won the support of seven presidential candidates and three of the nation's leading newspapers, reacted with indignation and disputed the debate commission's assertion that New Orleans has not recovered its touch for staging national events.

"Politics trumped the moral decision," said Anne Milling, founder of Women of the Storm, one of the sponsors of the proposed debate.

"They missed an opportunity to help America," said Norman Francis, president of Xavier University, which joined forces with Dillard, Loyola and Tulane to host the debate. In passing on New Orleans' bid, the commission skipped an opportunity to award a debate to a historically black college for the first time.

One of the cities selected, Oxford, Miss., which will host the first presidential debate on Sept. 26, won even though it lacked the hotel rooms required by the debate commission, Milling said. The University of Mississippi is the host of the Oxford debate.

The other winners announced Monday were Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., for a presidential debate on Oct. 7 and Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. for the last debate on Oct. 15. The vice presidential debate will be held Oct. 2 at Washington University in St. Louis, which has hosted a presidential debate in three of the past four elections.

There were two alternate sites selected: Danville, Ky., and Winston-Salem, N.C.

Milling said that Paul Kirk, co-chairman of the commission, told her Monday that New Orleans just isn't far enough along in its recovery to host a presidential debate.

"That is clearly untrue," Milling said. "New Orleans met or exceeded every criterion that the commission set forth in its application process in logistics, finance and educational partners."

Kirk, a Democrat, could not be reached for comment.

Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., the Republican co-chairman of the commission, said he doesn't know what Kirk told Milling, but described New Orleans as a sentimental favorite of commission board members and staff.

"It just came down to that there were better bids," Fahrenkopf said. He said the city fell short in a comparison of criteria listed in the commission's application such as press facilities, broadcast logistics such as sight lines, and security.

"No one knows better than I how great a city New Orleans is," said Fahrenkopf, who as chairman of the National Republican Committee brought the 1988 GOP presidential convention to the city.

"Most people believe that was the best political convention ever held by any political party, and I continue to have great affection for the city."

Seven presidential candidates -- five Democrats and two Republicans -- had signed letters to the commission expressing a preference that one of the debates be held in New Orleans, and that preference was shared initially by the commission's nine board members and two co-chairmen, Fahrenkopf said.

"Our hearts at the start were if it was possible to go to New Orleans we should," Fahrenkopf said. "We understand what people have gone through and know how much they wanted to host a debate."

But he said the winning proposals "were better," in terms of facilities offered.

Mike McCurry, a member of the debate commission who was President Bill Clinton's press secretary, said there was a lot of sentiment in favor of choosing New Orleans.

He said commission staffers weren't convinced the city could pay the required police overtime costs needed to host a national debate.

"There was also a question about whether this is a fair thing to do to ask the citizens of New Orleans, as much as we'd like to bring a debate to New Orleans, to pick up all these financial costs," he said.

Janet Brown, the commission's executive director, said the winning bids were approved in a unanimous vote of the commission's 11 board members.

The New Orleans debate proposal, one of 16 applications, was sponsored by Women of the Storm, formed after Hurricane Katrina to push Washington decision-makers to visit the area to see firsthand the devastation and recovery needs.

The group and the four colleges moved aggressively to build national support for the debate, including endorsements from The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post.

They also won the backing of Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden and Republican candidates John McCain and Sam Brownback. Brownback, a Republican senator from Kansas, has since dropped out of the race.

Staff for the Commission on Presidential Debates visited all the proposed sites, but offered few insights as to the process in determining the winning sites.

The commission is headed by two former national political party chairmen: Fahrenkopf, who led the National Republican Committee between 1983 and 1988, and Kirk, who ran the Democratic National Committee from 1985 to 1989.

The board of directors, according to two board members, was influenced heavily by the staff's recommendations.

Board members include John Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy; and Alan K. Simpson, the former GOP senator from Wyoming.

Louisiana elected officials reacted angrily to the rejection of New Orleans.

They noted that the commission's view of New Orleans as not ready to host a major event contrasts with the view of the NBA, which is holding its All-Star game here in February, and of the college football establishment, which is planning its national championship game in January.

Both of those events are much larger than the debate, which would have brought an estimated 2,500 reporters and hundreds of support personnel for the competing candidates.

"The commission appears to have lost sight of the public interest it was chartered to serve," said Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-New Orleans. "New Orleans was the only site supported by a bipartisan number of presidential candidates. The most prominent news organizations called for a debate in the city, and voters across the nation have clamored for the discussion the venue would raise about the federal government's role, responsibility and competence in a catastrophic disaster. Now it seems some inside the commission's deliberations set aside this unprecedented public consensus."

Landrieu said the decision was a great disappointment, not only for New Orleans and Louisiana, "but also to those of us who'd previously had faith in the commission's impartiality."

Gov. Kathleen Blanco said that the decision "is harmful" to the region's recovery efforts. "There is no better way to help our recovery than to give a boost to the tourism engine driving New Orleans, and to debate issues important to the Gulf Coast and to our country at ground zero of our nation's largest natural disaster," Blanco said.

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