Dr. Debate, continued

by Dan Kennedy

Q: Isn't there something inherently corrupt about the debates' being managed by a commission that's a tool of the two major parties? Shouldn't they be sponsored by the League of Women Voters or some other independent group?

A: The broadcast networks were the first sponsors of the Kennedy-Nixon debates. That's the only year in which they've done that. And then the League of Women Voters did the '76, '80, and '84 debates. They got out of the debate business in '88 when the campaigns basically gave them an ultimatum: our way or the highway. They took the highway, and then the commission stepped in. In each case, the campaigns have done exactly what they wanted to do anyway, so I think to some extent this question of sponsorship isn't that irrelevant. It does matter, but it hasn't made an appreciable difference in the quality or the content of the debates.

I don't think that the candidates are going to play ball with anybody that they're not reasonably comfortable with. Having said that, let's judge the commission by its track record, which I think has been pretty good. I don't think that anybody has ever charged the commission with unfairly favoring one side or the other, or having the public's interest somehow not at heart. What would be the ideal organization for something like this? You need somebody with a little bit of clout.

Frankly, I think one of the nice things to come out of this debate over debates is that the Commission on Presidential Debates stood its ground and withstood an assault from a campaign. You do need a fairly powerful entity to have some standing in the negotiations or the campaigns are just going to walk all over the sponsor. That's what was going on when the Bush people were shopping for a sponsor: you play one network off another, and all of a sudden it's an open bazaar. You do need some kind of entity. And whatever that entity is going to be, it probably will need ties to the major parties just to get them to sit down at the table.

Q: You give a lot of credit to Ronald Reagan for debating Walter Mondale in 1984 when he really didn't have to.

A: I think Reagan may have saved the institution of presidential debates. Because at that point, in '84, there had been debates in '76 between Carter and Ford, but there was only one debate between Reagan and Carter in '80. In '84 the pendulum was swinging away from a regular roster of debates. I think had Reagan decided that he didn't want to do it -- and clearly, based on his poll standings, he did not need to -- they would have gone away.

Q: You write that in 1988 the media distorted the climate going into the debates by producing endless stories on the so-called question of whether Michael Dukakis was likable or not. Have we seen anything like that this year?

A: Certainly not to that extent. The classic example of the press really setting off an advance expectation that was unrealistic for the candidate to be able to clear was the Michael Dukakis likability issue. The man was 50-something years old. He's not going to overnight be able to make himself likable, quote unquote.

With Dan Quayle, there was the question of his intelligence. He was so vilified intellectually before he went into that first debate that it's a wonder the man could even come out of his hotel room. There's certainly nothing paralleling that.

Obviously there have been stories about Bush's verbal slips, and so we may see a bit more of that kind of coverage going into it, especially if there are more verbal slips. I could foresee, for instance, a news package that edited together a kind of montage of Bush's greatest hits, where he said something like "subliminable." But that's pretty small potatoes [Are you sure there's an "e" in "potatoes"? -- Ed.] compared to the Dukakis and the Quayle examples.

This year we may get some good stories on how boring Dick Cheney is before the vice-presidential debate. I thought it was interesting, by the way, that they scaled back their original proposal for two of those to one, apparently based on the fact that Cheney's not setting the nation on fire with his vivacious personality. [Laughter.]

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.dankennedy.net

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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