So it turns out that Spiro Agnew was right all along, or half right, anyway.
There are conspiracies hatched by members of the East Coast media, even if part of the conspiracy is to make sure the Midwest isn`t forgotten.
Where Agnew was wrong was in claiming that these conspiracies were ideological. Not this most recent one. It had one goal-spontaneity, or at least a little unpredictability. I know because I was part of it. Call it the conspiracy of Room 500, for it was in that room (Judy Woodruff`s room at the Radisson Hotel here) that we plotters met Wednesday morning. Woodruff (of the ”McNeil-Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS) was to be the moderator and NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw, Brit Hume of ABC News and I were to ask the questions that evening of vice presidential candidates Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle in their nationally televised debate.
Truth to tell, we had a few other goals. No one, it may be assumed, wants to make a fool of himself or herself in front of 50 million people. So a certain amount of planning is required. You have to have enough questions to last 90 minutes, and you have to know what the other people are going to ask. Otherwise, you run the risk of having prepared nothing but a question that has just been asked and answered, leaving you with the choice of asking it again, sitting there with your mouth full of teeth or trying desperately to think of something else to ask. This is a consummation devoutly to be avoided.
But in this case there were a few other reasons to conspire. The rules of this particular debate forbade us to follow up our questions. Each of us got to ask a question, and should the candidate evade it, we had no recourse. Unless, that is, we followed up each other`s questions, a plan to which we agreed immediately. That might, of course, mean that one or more of us would not be able to get in the one question we considered most original and brilliant. And in fact, that`s what happened to me. What a wonderful question that was. But I`m not revealing it here, either. Who knows, maybe I`ll get another chance one day.
But continuing to be brutally candid, there were other, perhaps baser, motives for conspiring.
Sticking it, for instance, to the Plague of Women Vultures, which with its customary humility and grace had proclaimed two days earlier that the debate was a ”sham” and a ”hoodwinking of the American public,” in part because the presidential campaigns ”have determined how they will select those who would pose the questions.”
Heaven forfend. Now it should be understood that the Plague (which prefers to be known as the League of Women Voters) used to run these debates, and when it did, the campaign staffs had the right to veto proposed panel members, just as they do under this year`s plan. Once you are chosen you know that both sides have certified you as either fair or a patsy.
The Plague also had complained of the format`s prohibition of follow-up questions. So by creating de facto follow-ups, we accomplished two worthwhile goals: getting around a restriction desired by the campaigns and unmasking the Plague as being as prissy as it always has been, which is the reason the political parties decided to get it out of the debate business in the first place.
Besides, the follow-ups would be helpful to our basic goal of getting both candidates ”off their briefing books.” Long before the debate, the campaign staffs compile position statements on every issue known to mankind and boil them down to two-minute answers that the candidates then memorize.
And get this: The campaigns use the latest computer-search programs to call up all the campaign stories the questioner (print-press division) had written, the better to guess what he or she might ask. Pity the folks who had to read printouts of everything I`d written since January. Even I am not that fond of my own prose.
After that, of course, each campaign gets someone to play-act the role of the opposing candidates, and they run rehearsals.
Which, truth to tell, so did we. On Wednesday morning we sat at the panel table in the Civic Auditorium in Omaha while men wearing headsets and carrying microphones scurried about onstage to check sound and light levels.
It was hardly a substantive rehearsal. No one knew what we were going to ask. We just spent about half an hour running through the format. A Creighton University student stood at one lectern playing Quayle and a local businessman stood at the other pretending to be Bentsen and we asked questions such as,
”Senator, is it true that you like to wear pink pantyhose, and if not, why not?” and they answered.
They were both superb debaters and would be excellent candidates for public office.
Now continuing in the spirit of total candor, the folks who ran this debate, the officials of the Commission on Presidential Debates, did very gingerly make one substantive suggestion: Seeing as how we were in the Midwest, could somebody ask something about agriculture?
This struck us as quite reasonable. It seemed to me, in fact, that not asking such a question would be downright insulting, so I volunteered to do it, which presented a problem.
As a political reporter, I know nothing about reality, a fact several of my (now former) friends noted after the debate by asking me ”Where did you learn all that substance?”
Fortunately, in the Tribune`s Washington Bureau is Chris Drew, a reporter who knows a great deal about agriculture, and Marja Mills, a research assistant who can find out everything about anything. Thanks to them, I avoided making a fool of myself in front of 50 million people.
After rehearsal, it was back to Room 500 for more conspiring. It was then that Hume suggested asking the candidates what they would do on the very first day if they had to assume the presidency.
I liked the idea but said any good candidate could knock it for a loop. Hume agreed but decided to ask it anyway. The rest is history-Quayle swung and missed at the question three times-except for one more confession.
The thing I kept telling myself was to pay attention to the debate and not get locked in to asking my prepared questions. Once, I failed. I should have asked Bentsen the ”What would you do?” question during my last crack at him because he hadn`t answered it during his rebuttals.
He, of course, probably would have knocked it for a loop. But you know how it is with conspiracies. They are only as good as their conspirators.
