Officials from the George W. Bush and John Kerry election campaigns confirmed Monday that the topic of the third presidential debate, to be held at ASU, will be domestic policy, not foreign policy.
Campaign negotiators James A. Baker, of the Bush campaign, and Vernon Jordan, of the Kerry campaign, released a statement Monday announcing that the Oct. 13 debate at ASU would switch topics with the Sept. 30 debate at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.
The Commission on Presidential Debates released a statement June 17 stating the topics of the three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate.
But the topics weren't set in stone at that time, campaign officials from both sides said.
The Kerry campaign had approved the debate setup as it was proposed in June and did not push to switch the first and third debate topics, said Sue Walitsky, an Arizona Kerry campaign spokeswoman.
"The campaigns decide what to accept," Walitsky said. "We accepted [the debate formats] exactly as the Commission on Presidential Debates had put forward."
Walitsky added that the two campaigns had to negotiate the terms of the debate together and said the Bush campaign waited to accept the planned topics long after the Kerry campaign had already done so.
The Bush camp officially agreed on Monday to accept the topics.
Walitsky claims the Republicans delayed the process of accepting the debate topics.
"They tried to manage expectations," she said.
Sharon Castillo, a Bush campaign spokeswoman, said Bush's campaign has just finished negotiating with Kerry's campaign for the final version of the debate format. She added that Kerry had made a "premature announcement" earlier this year about his support of the first debate format, and that she couldn't comment further on the switch in debate topics.
If this year's debates follow previous patterns, the debate held at ASU would have a smaller viewing audience.
The first 2000 presidential debate at University of Massachusetts in Boston attracted nearly 47 million television viewers, according to statistics from the Commission on Presidential Debates. The following debates at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., and St. Louis had about 38 million viewers each.
Castillo said the campaign does not worry about which debates get the largest share of television viewers.
But she added that she thought the Bush campaign was doing the right thing by waiting longer than the Kerry campaign before finalizing its decisions about debate formats, instead waiting for a time at which it is comfortable.
"There was no agreement until both campaigns agreed to the debates," Castillo said. "We stand by that statement."
Reach the reporter at nicole.saidi@asu.edu.
