ASHINGTON - Like most journalists about to moderate a presidential debate, Jim Lehrer says he has no political biases that might get in the way of the job. But Lehrer seems to be truly, deeply neutral, one measure of which is this: He doesn't vote.
''I haven't voted since 1964,'' Lehrer said, sitting in his office just outside Washington. ''I don't want to get my judgment involved in what I do for a living.''
Lehrer, 66, interviews public figures five nights a week on his PBS broadcast, ''The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,'' and has been doing so for 25 years. He reads up on the issues as thoroughly as anyone in the business, hangs out with pols, is clearly a player in the Capitol game.
In addition to not voting, Lehrer resolutely avoids forming conclusions about candidates or their issues.
''I really don't have any politics,'' he said. ''I love politics. I admire the people who put themselves on the line. But I never take a stand.''
This is not a matter of separating his personal views from his public persona. ''No, no,'' he insisted. ''That's the way I am. I have found the more I know about something, the less opinionated I am about it.''
No wonder, then, that the official commission on presidential debates and the two main presidential candidates had no hesitation in picking Lehrer as the sole moderator of all three of next month's matches between Al Gore and George W. Bush - starting in Boston on Oct. 3.
Lehrer's news show has a reputation in some circles for being sober to a fault. (So did ''The MacNeil-Lehrer Hour,'' as it was called before his partner, Robert MacNeil, left to write novels.) The questions are considered ''soft,'' meaning polite, by news talk-show standards. The devotion to even-handedness is sighed away as an anachronism in an era of attitude.
This view was expressed most scathingly by the radical journalist Alexander Cockburn in a 1982 parody in Harper's that imagined ''balanced'' MacNeil-Lehrer Hours on cannibalism (''Should one man eat another?''), Jesus vs. Pontius Pilate (''Tonight, the crucifixion debate''), the Holocaust (''And now for another view of Hitler''), and so forth.
But it is this studied even-handedness, this utter nonpartisanship, this ego entirely under control that makes Lehrer so sought after as a debate-moderator.
''We had three criteria for a moderator,'' explained Janet Brown, the commission's executive director. ''One: somebody who has extensive experience in broadcasting live. Two: somebody familiar with the candidates and the issues. Three - and this is the touchiest: somebody who knows that he or she is not the one whose name is on the ballot.''
The commission assembled focus groups to watch and comment on past debates. They disliked moderators who treated the candidates like pupils in a pop quiz, (''Exactly how big is the deficit, Senator?'') or tried to trip them up with ''Gotcha!'' questions.
What they liked was a single moderator who asked questions that allowed the candidates to speak at length and reveal who they are. In short, they liked Jim Lehrer.
Todd Gitlin, professor of communications at New York University, agrees. Asked to explain Lehrer's appeal, he replied, ''I'm racking my brains for any controversy with which he's ever been associated.''
By contrast, Gitlin slammed NBC's Tim Russert for injecting himself so aggressively into the New York Senate debate between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican Representative Rick Lazio earlier this month. ''Jim Lehrer,'' he said, ''is the anti-Russert.''
Lehrer had no comment on the New York debate. ''I was traveling when it took place, and I just haven't had time to look at the videotape,'' he said with a smile that suggests he is happy to have an alibi for having no view.
He also demurred when asked about the moment in the 1988 presidential debate when CNN's Bernard Shaw asked Michael S. Dukakis how he would feel if someone raped and murdered his wife. ''I, uh, I'm not going to answer that,'' he said. (Shaw is moderating this year's vice presidential debate.)
''The bottom line for me,'' Lehrer said, picking his words carefully, ''is we are now about to elect the single most important and powerful person in the whole world. I am comfortable enough with my skills to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I will not abuse the power that I have by virtue of being the moderator of these debates. I cannot conceive that, when all is said and done, anybody will say the moderator was out of line, or treated somebody unfairly, or did anything that was other than professional. I am confident of that. I don't have to transform myself to be that way.''
A look back at the 1996 debates, which he also moderated - or at a PBS documentary, which aired last night, in which he questioned former presidents about memories of their own debates - reveals Lehrer's technique.
He asks questions that are at once open-ended, focused, and, perhaps above all else, short.
''Here's the thing,'' he said, lowering his voice to a whisper. ''The longer the question, the easier it is to evade. I work hard to get the question down to the point where if the candidate doesn't answer, everybody who's watching says, `Hey, that som'bitch didn't answer the question.' ''
Lehrer comes to his trade from modest roots. He was born in Wichita, Kan., and spent his childhood in several small towns across the state before moving in his teen years to Texas. His father, who never made it beyond the eighth grade, ran a failing bus company.
Lehrer worked as a Trailways ticket agent in junior college. The walls of his office are covered with logos and signs from long-defunct bus companies and terminals.
He started collecting these mementos in the 1970s, after his father died. ''A friend of mine asked me why I collect all this, and I said, `Well, it's part of my life,''' Lehrer recalled. ''But this person said, `No, no, no. What this is all about is that you are saying, to yourself and anybody else who cares, that what your father did mattered.'''
Lehrer paused and said, in a distant voice, ''Could be.''
After college and the Marine Corps, he went to what he calls ''the boot camp school of journalism,'' doing rewrites and obituaries for the Dallas Morning News.
''When you write obits and you get something wrong, you get your head handed to you in a way that is unlike anything else,'' he said. ''I learned the hard way that you have to get it right. You have to do everything you can to get it right. We hold people's reputations and lives in our hands all the time. It's live dynamite. And dammit, we ought to treat it like it's live dynamite.''
In 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Lehrer's editor gave him his first big chance: six months to look into all the conspiracy theories that were floating around. He dug up some intriguing bits but nothing that added up.
''I kept an open mind,'' he recalled. ''One theory after another didn't check out, but I thought maybe one day, some theory will prove to be correct, some hidden piece of evidence will be discovered, somebody will come forward. But it never happened. I now think time has run out on conspiracy-theory possibilities.''
Still, the experience may have shaped everything he has done since. It let him plumb deeply into a story, a chance few reporters get. It also gave him a benign - or at least a nonmalignant - view of authority.
''I spent a lot of time with law-enforcement people and investigators who, with a couple of minor exceptions, were exemplary people trying to find out the facts,'' he said. ''They were not a bunch of idiots. They were not a bunch of conspiracy people. They had open minds and they were working their butts off. They were as upset as anybody else was that the president of the United States had been assassinated.''
Lehrer moved to TV by sheer accident. In 1970, while working as city editor for the Dallas Times Herald, he wrote a novel, ''Viva Max!'' It was turned into a movie starring Peter Ustinov. The deal made him $45,000, big money back then, so he quit to write fiction full time.
By chance, the Dallas public TV station offered him a two-day-a-week job as a consultant, which he took for some easy extra money. Around this time, a San Francisco public TV station aired a show that featured local newspaper reporters talking about current events. Lehrer and his station manager went out to take a look. It seemed like fun. They started a similar show in Dallas, and Lehrer was hired to host it.
''Suddenly, I was on television five nights a week without ever making a decision about it,'' he said. In 1972, he went national and moved to Washington, where he and his wife, novelist Kate Lehrer, have lived since.
''Over the years,'' he said, ''I have wrung out of this operation all the false pressure, all the false stress. By that, I mean worrying about ratings, or `Do we have a jazzy beginning tonight?' or `What do the other guys have?'''
His personal pace seems equally unstressed. He gets up at 6 a.m., comes to the office by 8, spends an hour or so working on a novel (he has just published his 13th). Around 1 p.m., after a few hours of toiling on the day's show, he takes a nap before resuming, so he has enough energy to return to his novel at home later that night if he wants.
Now, with the Boston debate just over a week away, Lehrer has put aside his new novel for a while to prepare.
''I'm just working my ass off,'' he said. ''I'm thinking all the time, going back over things, refreshing my memory very precisely about what they've said, what their positions are, figuring out a way to make it work for the audience. I'm nowhere near ready, but I'm getting there.''
