Longtime USA Today White House bureau chief Susan Page, who will moderate Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Democrat nominee Kamala Harris, is widely respected, liked, and experts say she is capable of doing a great job keeping the debate on track.
Political experts say Page, an award-winning journalist and author, can excel in her role partially due to her experience grilling the country’s leaders.
“Susan Page obviously has been around the Washington scene and covered many presidents,” San Francisco-based political analyst Brian Sobel said. Throughout her career, she has interviewed nine presidents, six of them while they were in office.
“Her career has been more balanced, and it’s been in journalism,” said David Johnson, CEO of Strategic Vision PR Group, noting she didn’t intern for Joe Biden when he was in the Senate, like C-SPAN host Steve Scully. Scully is set to host the next presidential debate on Oct. 15.
Chris Wallace moderated the Trump-Biden debate and was widely criticized by conservatives for interrupting the president and was seen as pro-Biden.
Page, however, is bound to excel where Wallace failed. “She has covered presidents from Reagan on and for the most part she has been fair and balanced,” Johnson said.
Political commentator and Washington, D.C., .-based media consultant Stephen Kent said Page is “eminently qualified and ready to host this debate.” She will make history herself during the debate as the first print reporter selected by the Commission on Presidential Debates as a solo moderator.
Even though she is a print journalist, she isn’t camera-shy. She has been featured as a panelist on various political news shows including NBC’s “Meet the Press,” PBS’ “Washington Week,” CBS’ “Face the Nation,” and Fox News’ “Fox News Sunday.”
“She gives people equal love and equal hate,” Johnson said of Page’s frequent TV appearances.
She also used to be a frequent guest host on NPR's "The Diane Rehm Show.”
Kent described Page as having an “NPR personality” that will “jive well” with the 90-minute debate.
After watching Wallace moderate the first presidential debate Page told USA Today that she knows she has to be “very, very prepared.”
“I've tried to really think through what would be an approach that would work to keep the debate on track," she said, adding watching Wallace “reinforced” how prepared she will have to be for the face-off.
She said the debate will cover nine issues. Each topic, selected by Page, will be discussed for about 10 minutes. She chooses what questions to ask, which is something she calls an “awesome responsibility.”
"If you like it, that’ll be great. But if you don’t like it, I’ll be the person to blame," she told USA Today.
Johnson said Page witnessed how “everything went off the rails” during the presidential debate. He said Page is going to be “very conscious,” especially because this debate will likely attract more viewers than previous vice presidential square-offs due to Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis and the age of the two presidential candidates.
Sobel said Page will have a much easier time keeping Pence and Harris out of the back-and-forth arguing that took place between Trump and Biden. “It’s going to be a lot easier for her than it was for Wallace,” Sobel said, noting Harris and Pence’s personalities and debate styles are much different from the presidential candidates. “Page will be able to moderate the debate differently than Wallace did or could,” he said, noting the vice presidential candidates’ personalities “lend to a much smoother exchange.”
“It’s not really part of their personalities to argue in the same way,” he said.
Page got her start in journalism 47 years ago. Page graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and served as editor-in-chief of the Daily Northwestern. She has a master's degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she was a Pulitzer Fellow.
She began her career as a beat reporter for Newsday, a daily newspaper in Long Island, New York. She worked her way up and landed a role in paper's Washington Bureau, where she covered the 1980 presidential race between challenger Ronald Reagan and incumbent Jimmy Carter. In 1995, she became a White House correspondent for USA Today.
She has covered 10 presidential elections and six administrations. She interviewed world leaders like Jordan’s King Abdullah II and political leaders such as secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger.
Her work has landed her the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency twice. She has also received the White House Correspondents Association's Aldo Beckman Award and the association's Merriman Smith Memorial Award for Deadline Reporting on the Presidency.
She was selected as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes twice and served as chair of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. In 2011, she was president of the historic Gridiron Club for D.C.-based journalists. In 2000, she led the White House Correspondents Association.
Last year, she released her first book, “The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty." She is currently working on finishing her second entitled “Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power," set to be released in April.
Johnson said Republicans “may be leery” on whether she can remain unbiased during the debates because of the subjects of her books, but he predicts she will be more balanced than Wallace.
Page isn’t the only journalist in her household. Her husband Carl Leubsdorf is the Washington columnist for the Dallas Morning News. One of their sons previously worked as a reporter at the Washington bureau of The Wall Street Journal.
She told USA Today she sees the debate as “a chance for American voters to take a look at these two candidates and see both what they think of them personally and what they think about their policy ideas. That is my North Star in thinking about this."
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