To borrow a term from the political pollsters, this has been a vintage campaign season for ”negatives.”
The presidential primary season was too long; the Iowa caucuses were a bad place to start; Super Tuesday in the South was a bust; and the
conventions, the conventional wisdom reads, were idle exercises in ceremonial posturing.
Now come the debates, two between Vice President George Bush and Gov. Michael Dukakis, one with Sen. Lloyd Bentsen and Sen. Dan Quayle. The first of the 90-minute confrontations between the presidential candidates will air live at 7 p.m. Sunday from Winston-Salem, N.C., on all three commercial networks and CNN.
How significant are televised debates in the electoral process? In the debates since 1960, each meeting has left an imprint on the campaign but has rarely been seen as the deciding factor on Election Day.
The absence of an incumbent president behind the lectern for the first time since 1960 may lend more weight to the candidates` television
performance, as does the perception that this is a close race with large numbers of voters undecided.
Washington pollster Peter Hart speculates that the first Bush-Dukakis debate could engender a swing of as much as 10 points in the polls. A series of ”tracking polls,” which monitor patterns of voter support for candidates, indicate that support for both candidates is ”soft”-and thus susceptible to a strong performance, or a disastrous one, by either candidate.
The debates have been criticized on logistical grounds. The presence of a panel of anointed journalists effectively turns the debate into a kind of parallel press conference, the argument goes. And the opening-statement-closing-statement format allows hired speechwriters to alter the focus and lull the process-as well as the viewers-to sleep with political bromides.
We have come to think of televised presidential debates as an integral part of the political process. It is easy to forget that there were no televised debates in 1964, 1968 and 1972, and that the first nationally televised debate between vice presidential candidates took place in 1976, as did the first televised confrontation between an incumbent president, Gerald Ford, and his challenger, Jimmy Carter.
We remember the telegenic triumph of John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon in the 1960 round of four debates. But we forget that among the prime issues in those confrontations were the fate of the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, off the coast of China, and a ”missile gap” with the Soviets that never materialized in a Kennedy administration.
And we ignore data which indicate that among those listening to the debates on radio, Nixon was perceived as the victor. As it happened, TV perception was all, and the nature of presidential campaigns was forever altered. Nixon lost, and he looked bad doing it.
In his ”Political Dictionary,” author William Safire cites a Chicago Daily News headline after the first of the Kennedy-Nixon debates: ”Was Nixon Sabatoged by TV Makeup Artist?” And in ”The Making Of The President 1960,” Theodore White wrote, ”The salient fact of the great TV debates is not what the candidates said, nor how they behaved, but how many of the candidates`
fellow Americans gave up their evening hours to ponder the choice between the two.”
A television debate can swing on a moment. Indeed, they almost always do. In the 1980 primary season, candidate Ronald Reagan faced down candidate George Bush in a high school gymnasium in Nashua, N.H. Bush had won the Iowa caucuses after attacking ”voodoo economics” and had slowed the Gipper`s momentum to the point where a number of heads rolled inside the Reagan campaign.
But on this night in New Hampshire, Bush was nettled by Reagan`s encouragement of four other GOP candidates to show up for the debate. Bush protested the tactic in front of a TV audience and a crowd of about 2,500.
When moderator Jon Breen ordered Reagan`s microphone cut off as a means of restoring some order, Reagan leaned forward and intoned, ”I`m paying for this microphone, Mr. Green (sic.)” By most accounts, it was the moment on which the New Hampshire primary, and the Republican primary race, turned. Reagan won New Hampshire by a 2 to 1 ratio.
Ronald Reagan became the master of the television moment. Just before his lone 1980 TV debate with Jimmy Carter, the presidential race was rated a tossup, and one Gallup poll even gave Carter a slight edge. But the Cleveland debate, held within two weeks of the election, was a bravura performance by Reagan, with the beaming challenger assailing an incumbent saddled with a shaky economy and an embassy full of hostages in Iran.
It was a debate with Reagan at his folksy, easygoing, telegenic best. When Carter confronted him on one apparent contradiction or another, Reagan called them ”distortions” and ”misstatements.” And it was in this forum that the Republican challenger diminished a sitting president, shaking his head at Carter`s attacks and saying, with a smile, ”There you go again . . . ”
In his closing statement that evening, Reagan finished off his opponent by asking the viewing audience, ”Are you better off than you were four years ago?” With that, Reagan strode confidently across the stage to shake hands with an incumbent president who appeared anchored to his lectern.
In the end, Reagan defeated Carter by a margin of 10 percent in the popular vote and 489-49 in the Electoral College.
In his second debate with Walter Mondale in 1984, Reagan was forced to deal with a general perception that he had botched the first debate, held in Louisville. Despite a 23-point Reagan lead in a New York Times/CBS poll on the eve of that first debate, the polling data after Louisville indicated that most Americans thought the incumbent president had fared badly against Mondale.
A Gallup poll the week after the first debate showed that, by a 54-to-35- percent margin, viewers felt Mondale had gotten the better of Reagan.
”Tentative” and ”distracted” were among the phrases used in news accounts to describe Reagan`s performance.
Two weeks later, in Kansas City, Reagan addressed the age and competence issue by tossing off a pithy one-liner at Mondale`s expense. When referred to by a debate panelist as ”the oldest president in our history,” Reagan said, smiling, ”I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent`s youth and inexperience.”
If Reagan`s recovery in the second debate had little impact on the eventual Republican landslide, it did neutralize an important issue for the Democrats, that of the incumbent`s age and competence.
As moments go in the debate process, Gerald Ford had a devastating one in his second debate with Jimmy Carter. Ford uttered the following, ”There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
The first debate, in Philadelphia, had gone well for Ford. Carter`s considerable lead in Gallup polls had shrunk to about 8 percentage points. But battling the specters of Watergate and the Nixon pardon, the Ford camp needed a strong showing in the second debate, held in San Francisco. They did not get it, as reaction to Ford`s gaffe rolled to a boil.
Meanwhile, in the first televised debate between vice presidential candidates, Republican Sen. Bob Dole was establishing the ”attack dog” image that would chase him right through the 1988 presidential derby. Debating Mondale in Houston, Dole appeared to relish his assault on the Carter administration, making fun of Carter`s celebrated ”lust in my heart”
interview in Playboy.
All but sneering at his rival, Dole made reference to ”the 1.7 million killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century,” a remark that seemed to question the worth of World War II.
In addition to the microphone gambit in New Hampshire in 1980, Bush has had other rough moments. The day after his 1984 debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, a New York Times/CBS poll showed that more than half the viewers felt Bush had bested the Democrat.
That same day, however, in Elizabeth, N.J., Bush was overheard telling a longshoreman, ”We kicked a little ass last night.” That unfortunate moment became the one Bush was forced to carry away from his vice presidential debate.
For all that, Bush did well in the seven Republican debates held during the primary season.
Michael Dukakis, a man with some broadcast experience as host of a Boston public affairs show a decade ago, endured nearly 40 formal debates with other Democrats from a seven-man free-for-all in Iowa to a one-on-one with Jesse Jackson in California.
All that can be surmised with any certainty is that something will happen Sunday night that will leave an impression, raise an issue, reverse or propel campaign momentum. With as many as 130 million people watching, the dynamic of the television debate could not work any other way.
