WASHINGTON -- On behalf of the beleaguered targets of presidential politics, meet this year's heroine - Janet Brown.
A lifelong Republican who works for a Kennedy Democrat, a Reagan Republican on a bipartisan board, this backstage junkie is the main reason the country will get three 90-minute cracks at George W. Bush and Al Gore next month, along with a 90-minute opportunity to study Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman.
When it began to look as if the debates were in danger of foundering, it was her bipartisan wisdom and discipline that rescued them for the rest of us. Come to think of it, she has been essential to the debates' overwhelming success in their current form for all 13 years she has been doing her thankless job.
The key to her work behind the scenes this year can be found first of all in this critical fact: Governor Bush's position was never criticized, and Vice President Gore's position was never supported, by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which she serves as executive director. In the end, Gore didn't win this tussle; the commission and the public did.
As with all executive directors, Brown's authority is entirely derivative. From the beginning, when the commission succeeded the League of Women Voters on the recommendations of two study panels, the Republican co-chair has been Frank Fahrenkopf, the Democratic cochair has been Paul Kirk, each at the time their party's national chairman. It may have been ''somebody's got to do this'' at the beginning, but Fahrenkopf and Kirk have since become passionate about their responsibility and scrupulous about rejecting the occasional entreaties of partisan buddies.
But someone has also had to walk the point all these years, bringing major league production values to the debates, opening up the formats, making it all work. After three successful seasons, this will be the first in which the commission's entire schedule has survived candidate shenanigans. Don't think it was easy.
Through a critical period of high-stakes poker, with each side looking for a reason to brand Brown and thus the commission a tool of the other, she pressed three points that transcended partisanship and therefore carried the day:
The commission can put the show together, partly because it has 10 times previously since 1988 and partly because its criteria for candidate selection have met legal tests for objectivity.
The public interest is in the largest possible audience for the largest possible number of debates. The commercial networks can't assemble this, and neither can one of the candidates unilaterally.
Format is flexible - always has been.
From the moment Bush's people tried to bust the commission's plan to their own advantage (it could just as easily have been Gore's people in different circumstances), that was her message. She said it in public, but most important, she said it in private, when things could have gotten ugly, in meetings and on conference calls.
Not only was Bush trying to bend things his way; he had de facto allies in the promotion-crazed networks, two of which (CNN and NBC) actually got in bed with him for a spell. But the side deals couldn't survive Brown's arguments on behalf of the public, backed by an astonishing avalanche of newspaper editorials from all ideologies and all parts of the country.
Brown never gloated, but the rest of us owe this person a deep bow. She's fourth-generation D.C., sheepskins from Williams College and Harvard University, and experience in the White House, the State Department of the late Elliot Richardson, and the office of former Republican Senator Jack Danforth of Missouri, who is now a commission board member.
When the debates begin next month in Boston, viewers of cable will probably see her briefly, helping set the scene and warm up the auditorium audience. They will be seeing the best of which politics in this country is capable.
They will also learn the truth of her mom's strong view that she should eat more.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.
