Debate's backstage crew preps for the big show

“The big issue is power.”

That’s what the Democratic presidential debate on Saturday is all about. But CBS News Vice President Christopher Isham was talking about the kind of power that, if it failed, would shut down the whole megawatt operation at Drake University’s Sheslow Auditorium.

“That’s obviously the ultimate nightmare,” he said, “but we’re confident we have the system in place.”

The back-up system is in place, too. Even the back-ups have back-ups.

Isham has spent the past six months preparing for the big night. He’s guided the preparations on two tracks: the editorial one, which involves the reporters and moderators, and the logistical one, which involves the busy buzzing swarm of support staff that converged on Drake's southeast corner last weekend.

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“It’s a whole logistical train that started in motion this summer and has been in full gear over the last few months,” Isham said.

He declined for proprietary reasons to say how many CBS staffers are involved, but a few dozen CBS and subcontracted workers ricocheted around the auditorium on Thursday afternoon.

They hung lights. Tested mics. Installed nine cameras. They polished the glowing flat-screens on the set, which was designed by a guy from Broadway.

 'Cool experience' for student stand-ins

Everyone had a job except the three candidates, who are still trying to land one. When Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley arrive, they will be whisked away to makeshift green rooms in the university’s administrative offices.

Sanders has been assigned to Drake President Earl "Marty" Martin's office, marked with a brass plaque that simply reads, whether prophetic or not, "President." O’Malley will be down the hall in the provost’s office, next door to Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in the office of the dean of students. The quarters for Clinton, under protection of the Secret Service, are under wraps.

In the meantime, three Drake students stood in for the candidates on stage while the lighting crew focused all 270 lights. The students were chosen for their height.

“It’s a little odd, but it’s a cool experience,” said Colorado freshman Haley Hodges, 5’5’’, standing behind Clinton’s lectern at center stage. “I did this last night for an hour and a half.”

She wore a pair of running shoes with turquoise laces, standing zen-like between fake Sanders (Tom Bernier, 6’1”, of Madison, Wis.) and fake O’Malley (Ryan Hultman, 6’2”, of suburban Chicago). All three young voters are still undecided.

The lighting crew had hauled heavy trusses up to the balcony via steep curving staircases on either side of the stage. They carried up the lights, too, but had to pause last weekend for a student’s oboe recital. It could have been the brightest oboe recital the world has ever known.

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“I can’t even imagine how much this costs,” local stagehand Kim Grimaldi said on the balcony. “It’s quite a village we’re building here.”

A union member and local actress, Grimaldi often works backstage at the Des Moines Civic Center, where set-ups for concerts and road shows are similar.

“It’s that intense craziness,” she said.

Cords ran everywhere, snaking in bundles across the floor. They snaked from the flat-screens to a nest of audio-visual gear backstage and then to the satellite trucks outside. They snaked along the sidewalks and then back into multiple doors. Someone could probably shoot another Samuel L. Jackson movie and call it “Snakes on Old Main.”

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Twitter will host 'national conversation'

Beyond the trucks and humming generators, over in the law school’s Cartwright Hall, another crew set up black-curtained stalls for the so-called “spin alley.” It's where reporters and pundits will come after the debate to hash over the performance.

The area is sponsored by CBS and Twitter, whose team installed another big flat-screen to display an evolving collage of tweets. Earlier, half-a-dozen Twitter staffers were sanding and re-painting a wooden sculpture that read #DemDebate.

“One of the letters took a bit of a beating, so you caught us in the middle of craft time,” said Twitter’s Adam Sharp of Washington, D.C.

He said when they carried the individual letters from the truck, they could have been in a “Sesame Street” episode, brought to you by the letter "D."

The sculpture eventually landed on Old Main’s front lawn, a reminder that even though the debate has just three official participants, millions more will weigh in from afar.

“Debates are inherently participatory,” Sharp said.

Ever since CBS’ first televised debate, between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, arm-chair pundits have chattered away in living rooms across the country. Twitter can now unify that chatter into a national conversation.

“We’re trying to bring in those voices and that experience,” Sharp said.

A new-ish tool called Curator allows users to wade through the river of live tweets and pull out bigger ideas. Experts such as Sharp can track spikes in the number of tweets during the debate and assess which candidates are building what he called “vertical momentum.” With his finger, he traced the line of an imaginary mountain range.

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At this point, the tools to assess whether those spikes are positive or negative are still a little blunt, Sharp said, but they’re getting sharper every day. And that could be useful for other big televised events, like the Super Bowl or the Oscars ceremony.

Behind the scenes, those spectacles aren’t so different from the debate. The lights. The gear. The set-up and tear-down. The stagehands and reporters and stars.

Martee Nuruddin, a lighting technician from Orlando, said that “in the end, whether you do rock-'n'-roll or Broadway or TV, the skills are pretty much the same.”