Election debates

A fine article on the United States election debates from Al Jazeera:

"After last night’s debate, the reputation of Messieurs Lincoln and Douglas is secure." Edward R Murrow, journalist, after listening to the Kennedy-Nixon debate, September 26, 1960.

The first US presidential debates of the televison age proved how the new medium favoured image over substance.

What John F Kennedy, then a Democrat senator and Richard Nixon, the Republican vice-president, talked about in 1960 including an obscure discussion of Quemoy and Matsu, two tiny islands in the straits of Taiwan - has been mostly forgotten.

What is remembered is how they looked: Kennedy, fresh from a campaign swing through California, was tanned, relaxed and charismatic; Nixon, recovering from knee surgery, was haggard, nervous and sweaty.

Audience surveys showed most viewers believed Kennedy won the debate decisively.

Head-to-head

He scored a narrow victory on election day itself - and television became a dominant force in US elections.

"Up until that point politics had been conducted behind closed doors and in the print medium," says Alan Schroeder, a professor of journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.

Schroeder, the author of Presidential Debates: 40 Years of High-Risk TV, says after 1960, politics "became a television programme. And we really never have moved away from that. The thing that happened in 1960 established politics as a television show and it continues to this very day."

Out of touch

In 1976, Gerald Ford, the Republican president, was rising in the polls against Jimmy Carter until he blundered in his response to a foreign policy question, declaring emphatically: "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration."

Ford later explained that he meant to say his administration would never concede Soviet domination of the region, but voters thought Ford was out of touch and confused; they showed him the door a month later.

In 1980, Carter was on the defensive and Ronald Reagan, the Republican challenger, posed viewers of their debate a devastatingly direct question: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

This was in the midst of a recession, a petrol shortage, and the Tehran US embassy hostage crisis, when fighters held US diplomats for over a year in support of the Iranian revolution.
Voters concluded that they would be better off without Carter.

Four years later, Reagan rambled and stumbled in his first face-off with Walter Mondale - raising questions about whether the 73-year-old president was becoming addled with age.

But Reagan regained ground in the second debate, with a well-rehearsed line flipping the age issue on its head: "I refuse to exploit for political purposes," Reagan declared, "my opponent's youth and inexperience."

The line brought down the house. Mondale won exactly one state and the District of Columbia that year — one of the worst wipeouts in US political history.

Emotion counts

1988 featured an exceptionally nasty campaign, and one in which debates played a key role in the face-off between George HW Bush and Michael Dukakis, the Democrat candidate.

Dukakis shocked viewers with his dispassionate answer to an emotionally-loaded question that mentioned Dukakis's wife, Kitty.

The death penalty was a major topic in that year's campaign, with Bush gung-ho in favour of executions and Dukakis opposed to them.

In addition, Dukakis had a reputation for an almost robotic personality - something of a cold fish without human emotions.

Bernard Shaw of CNN, the debate's moderator, asked Dukakis, "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favour an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?"

Dukakis answered immediately, "No, I don't, Bernard, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life."

He went on with a wonkish digression about the war on drug abuse. "What was so surprising was how quickly Dukakis answered," Shaw told me in a conversation at his Washington DC home recently.

"He began talking almost before I'd finished asking the question. That showed me he really hadn't listened to it carefully."

In the press room, reporters who heard Dukakis' reply said to one another, "That's it for him; he's lost it."

And indeed, Dukakis lost to Bush in a landslide victory a few weeks later.

Shaw said he suffered a lot of criticism for his question, but believes to this day it was an appropriate way to try to pierce the well-rehearsed answers that politicians often give when asked about controversial matters.

After all, it was Dukakis's answer — not Shaw's question — that torpedoed the Massachusetts governor's candidacy.

Memorable put-downs

1988 also saw the best put down of any debate.

The young Republican vice-presidential candidate, Dan Quayle, compared his career to that of John Kennedy to claim he had experience. That provoked a withering response from Democrat Lloyd Bentsen: "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy: I knew Jack Kennedy; Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."

There was an gasp from the audience, clearly audible in the hall on television sets all over the country.

Cameras cut away to Quayle's reaction. He looked, Shaw said, "Like a schoolboy who'd been scolded by his teacher."

Quayle became vice-president that year, but never regained his dignity or achieved any stature among the public, largely due memories of Bentsen's riposte.

The debates of the 1990's were not especially memorable; by then, candidates were schooled to play it safe and rarely veered from pre-rehearsed scripts.

An exception came in the 1992 vice-presidential debate, when third party candidate James Stockdale's opening line backfired.

"Who am I? Why am I here?" the elderly former US Navy admiral asked, apparently rhetorically.

For a moment it appeared as if he were truly disoriented or perhaps even demented.

Comedians had a field day with him.

Historic consequences

The 2000 debate between Al Gore and George Bush, the current Republican president was, like 1960, a judgment of style over substance.

Millions watched the George Bush and John Kerry debates in 2004 [EPA] Gore's heavy sighs during Bush's answers gave many viewers the impression of petulance and annoyance.

His repeated use of the odd word "lock-box" with reference to sequestering US Government old-age pension funds from the general spending budget also earned him delighted taunting from late-night comedy shows.

Gore won the popular vote in 2000, but Bush won the presidency when the Republican-dominated supreme court halted a recount in Florida.

The next time around, in 2004, Bush made a series of odd facial grimaces during his first debate with John Kerry, and conspiracy theorists believed that he was getting instructions on how to answer from aides via a hidden wireless earphone. Bush’s campaign denied the charges. Now, with John McCain and Barack Obama running neck and neck, their debate at the University of Mississippi on Friday, September 26th may be crucial, giving still-undecided voters their best shot at sizing up both men in a way that goes beyond evening news sound-bites or scripted political advertisements.

"What we are evaluating are what the lawyers call demeanor evidence," Schroeder says.

"What does someone look like, their expression, whether they appear confident and in command, or intimidated.

"All of those are difficult to measure in other contexts, but presidential debates do give you that opportunity." Neither McCain nor Obama are known as particularly skilled debaters, and both have a history of gaffes, so now the political vultures are circling, ready to strike at any misstep.
A smile, quip, a mistake or a frown could swing enough voters to make a difference — with historic consequences for the entire world.