The Boston Phoenix
September 21 - 28, 2000
![[Don't Quote Me]](/standard/image/headers/dont_quote_me_header.gif)
What follows is a longer version of the interview with Alan Schroeder, assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and author of the just-released Presidential Debates: Forty Years of High-Risk TV (Columbia University Press) that appears in this week's Phoenix. Dr. Debate
Northeastern's Alan Schroeder talks about 40 years of televised debates -- and about the upcoming slugfest between Gore and Bush
by Dan Kennedy
Q: So, was George W. Bush afraid to debate because he's too stupid or what?
A: [Laughter.] Well, he was pretty clearly afraid to debate. First, he was afraid of being outmatched, intellectually and otherwise, by Al Gore. But second, I think there's a family tradition of being resistant to debates. I think that George W. must have looked at his father's example and said, "This is really dangerous. I'm not sure I want to have happen to me what happened to him" -- especially in the 1984 debate with Geraldine Ferraro, which I think was one of George Sr.'s worst performances.
And then there was the 1992 town-hall debate in which Bush was caught looking at his watch, told a woman in the audience "I don't get it" when she asked him a question about the national debt, and was generally thought to have really done himself a lot of harm. So I think those were his two trepidations.
Q: Even though Bush has done well in the polls all year, and was ahead until recently, he's still going up against an incumbent vice-president. Didn't it occur to him to he had to debate in order to establish himself as an equal to Gore?
A: It must have. This whole strategy about trying to scale back the debates completely mystified me, and I have looked at all of these negotiations really closely. I've never seen one quite like this. It seems to me that the Bush people were dealing from what they considered a position of strength, because if you're in command of the situation you can dictate your terms, and if you don't want to do the debates as proposed then you have enough clout to get your way. But they didn't have that standing.
So they used a kind of frontrunner's strategy when in reality they were not the frontrunners -- and it backfired big time, if I can quote our vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney. He knew he had to debate, and he wanted to get the best possible deal for himself, as candidates always do. But in this instance he was doing so from a false sense of security.
Q: You write that there's been a drawn-out debate over the debates during almost every presidential campaign. Why did Bush come out of this particular debate over debates looking so silly?
A: This is the first time that a major-party candidate has tried to stiff the Commission on Presidential Debates. That made it different, because the commission, while not everybody's favorite organization, has done a creditable job, and no campaign has ever come back after the fact and complained about their sponsorship.
This notion about not wanting to debate in Boston is the first time any candidate ever, for geopolitical reasons, wanted to avoid a particular city. I mean, you are running for president of the country. You can't just designate certain areas as being off limits.
And this paranoia about format -- they're always concerned about format, but this insistence that it had to be a sit-down with a moderator in a studio, and that somehow that was going to be the saving grace for George W. Bush -- was also not really on target. The bottom line is, Gore's good in that format, too. Gore's been very good in that format.
So there were a lot of odd and mistaken assumptions that made this debate over debates a little bit different. And maybe things will come out in the weeks that will help put some of this into context. But right now I'm more confused and baffled by it than anything else.
Q: On the face of it, the objection to Boston makes a little bit of sense. But I assume that the Bush campaign would have had a lot of say, and will have a lot of say, over who's going to be in the audience.
A: Yes. The audience, in these commission-sponsored debates, is an even three-way split. Each campaign and the commission split the audience seating three ways. And to the viewer at home, it is anywhere. Because I'm sure if you went around and surveyed people even the day after the debate and asked them where was it held, this is not the thing uppermost in any viewer's mind.
Not that Bush had a chance of carrying Massachusetts; he really doesn't, obviously. But there are other New England states in play that might take offense. The whole idea that you single out a part of the country for some advance retribution was just a really weird strategy.
Q: Al Gore's reputation as a master debater comes from annihilating flakes like Ross Perot and stiffs like Bill Bradley. Yet he had trouble in 1992 with Dan Quayle, of all people. How good is he really?
A: Al Gore has been very lucky in his opponents. He has never gone against one of the what I would call master debaters: a Bill Clinton, a Ronald Reagan. He's never had a one-on-one with Jesse Jackson. Bill Bradley was not a wonderful debater. And Ross Perot was, as you say, a flake.
So why did Quayle do so well against him? I think Quayle's performance itself was nothing to write home about, but he was being measured by his previous performance, so he appeared to do better than he really did. But Gore was effective at coming out of the gate swinging. His very first remark reminded the audience that two out of the three people on stage [Gore and Admiral James Stockdale, Perot's running mate] were Vietnam veterans and therefore Quayle was not. And then he zinged Dan Quayle about the you-are-no-J.F. Kennedy remark [first delivered by Lloyd Bentsen four years earlier] in a very direct way.
Gore's mistake there was in not coming to Clinton's defense. Gore's performance certainly had its moments, but overall he didn't come to Clinton's defense after Quayle gave Clinton a pretty serious pounding. And that was a bad move.
I don't think Gore is the great master debater. I think he's a really prepared debater, and there's much to be said for preparation. And I think that he does something else well, which is to understand a particular moment and understand what is unique about a particular opponent. If you read the James Fallows piece in the Atlantic Monthly, you'll see that he studied very closely what would get under Perot's skin, what would get under Quayle's skin. And he deliberately tailors his debate performance to his opponent.
On the downside, he is not a warm, fuzzy character. He has this tendency to be very pedantic. He has a tendency to be sing-songy in his approach. So from some of the stylistics, I think he's maybe not as natural a television performer as certain others. If Bush has even a fighting chance here, he has to sort of out-gregarious, if you will, his opponent. He has to be funnier and looser and more natural. Because Al Gore is none of those things.
Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.dankennedy.net
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com
Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here
