The Boston Phoenix
September 21 - 28, 2000
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Q: What about the expectations game? Will Gore be declared the loser unless he basically rips Bush's heart out and hands it to him? Dr. Debate, continued
by Dan Kennedy
A: Yeah, Gore is definitely the loser in the expectations-setting game, at this point anyway, because he does have a much higher bar to jump over than does Bush. But that's inevitable. Somebody's going to go in and thought to be ahead in the game and somebody else behind. And then it becomes a matter of whether you can exceed those expectations.
One of the most consistently amusing things in looking at the news coverage of debates over the years is this elaborate ritual of low-balling the candidates right before the debates. The contortions that the spinmeisters go into to try to position even somebody like Bill Clinton as somehow being out of practice and not ready for the debate -- it's ludicrous.
Q: You write that instant debate analysis got its start in 1976, when Ford and Carter were forced to stand by for 27 minutes after power in the studio was accidentally cut.
A: Definitely, because the networks were left with this gaping hole of dead air. And, of course, the last thing you want to do is just sit on a static shot. By the way, when we say static shot, it was like a freeze frame, because neither Carter nor Ford moved so much as a hair for the 27 minutes.
The networks realized that they had to do something. They went to their correspondents in the hall, and the correspondents were understandably reluctant to try to summarize for fear of sounding partisan one way or the other and make any judgments. And so they started grabbing these campaign aides who were out in the lobby and asking them, "What's going on and how did the candidates do?" All of a sudden, spin was sort of sprung into being. And it's never gone away. It's only become worse and worse and worse.
Q: According to your research, instant polls show the public initially believed that Ford had won his '76 debate with Carter and that Reagan had won his first debate in '84 with Mondale. Those numbers changed only after the pundits emphasized Ford's botched answer involving Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and Reagan's shaky performance. Were the media unduly influencing the process, or were they properly stressing events to which the public wasn't paying enough attention?
A: Probably a little of both. Let's make a distinction between the Ford and the Reagan case. Ford made a slip of the tongue and then compounded the problem by not 'fessing up that he had misstated himself. So the press piled on more in reaction to his unwillingness to correct himself than to the original sin.
In the case of Reagan, I think that's more interesting and complicated. Almost anyone who saw that debate was going to have a visceral reaction to the age issue, because Reagan really did perform very badly and it was clear that he was not his usual self. But there's such wretched excess when one of these things starts to happen. By the second or third day, this was all that the Washington press corps was covering.
And so it's probably a question of degree. It did need to be pointed out. It was a valid story. Is the president of the United States capable of handling the job, given his age and this bizarre performance that he put on in Louisville, Kentucky? That's a reasonable question to ask. But then it becomes the only thing that people are talking about and leads to all sort of speculation. Sam Donaldson mentioned on the air something about whether the president was senile. That perhaps exceeds the bounds of what journalists ought to be doing.
Q: You cite an essay that Charlie Pierce [the author of Hard to Forget: An Alzheimer's Story] wrote for the Boston Globe last year in which he argued that Reagan was actually showing early signs of Alzheimer's. What's your take on that?
A: I thought that was at least worth putting on the table as a discussion point, because obviously something strange was going on there. I, of course, am not in a position to make any kind of a diagnosis as to whether that was really Alzheimer's or not. But it was such an intriguing mention. I think he wrote something like, you could ask Reagan, you could have asked him where he was that night and he wouldn't have been able to tell you.
Q: And that Mondale would have been elected president.
A: Yes, yes, right. And there again, I think that's an example of what debates can do. They may not answer all of our questions, but they can alert us to things that -- because presidents and candidates are so carefully packaged -- we wouldn't otherwise get to see. And I think we, as viewers, need to be clever enough to understand what's going on. And obviously the press has a role to play in interpreting those things, too.
Q: As I understand it, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates the participants were required to speak anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour uninterrupted. How do you think today's politicians would stand up to such a format?
A: Well, I'll tell you, I went back and looked at some of the primary debates this past year. And George W. Bush, in periods in which he had two or three minutes to answer, was repeating himself. [Laughter.] So I think that they would not stand up very well. But of course you could also ask whether the audience stand up very well listening to 30- and 60-minute uninterrupted verbiage. And the answer there is probably no, too. Our whole notion of time is so different from that era to this. It's just so out of our realm of experience.
Q: Although Clinton would probably do okay.
A: Yeah, and Clinton might actually hold the audience's attention for 30 or 60 minutes as well.
Q: Your take on whether the debates help determine the outcome of the election appears to be that they can play a small but crucial role. Should they?
A: In an ideal world there probably are other, more valid things, such as close scrutiny of voting records and careful attention to issues positions -- any of those kinds of data that are either provable or that are fairly tangible. But let's face it, people aren't going to do that. So what alternatives do we have? We've got the news coverage, which is valuable to a certain extent. We've got advertising, which, in my personal opinion, is worthless. And we've got the debates.
And so we sort of clutch at straws in trying to get through to the candidates and get some of their message unfiltered. The debates, meager as they are and limited as they are in their ability to deliver information, are probably the best vehicles we have. So yes, I think that there are better ways, and I would hate to think that anybody just sits and watches the debates, reads nothing else, and then goes into the voting booth and makes a decision based on that viewing.
Q: Although you write that that doesn't happen with too many people.
A: It doesn't seem likely. First of all, how can you avoid the news about the campaign unless you're just willfully going out of your way to not read, see, or hear? It's been permeating the atmosphere for a year now. Who knows precisely what kind of an effect the debates can have when they're one of a number of influences that we're exposed to?
Q: Can you identify a few key ways in which the debates could be improved?
A: Yeah. There have been some really interesting proposals for experimenting with format. For instance, group debates or team debates, because candidates, when they work, or presidents, when they work, do not make decisions alone or in isolation; they work with advisers. So what would happen if you had advisers on stage with candidates and you got a sense of how they would work, the dynamic of team? I think that would be interesting.
I think it might be interesting to do a case-study debate where you had a theoretical situation that you presented, sort of like what Charles Nesson and Arthur Miller of Harvard Law School have done in various forums.
I'd like to see the inclusion of videotape in debates. You saw this in the Rick Lazio-Hillary Clinton debate the other night, where Tim Russert played little excerpts and asked them to comment. I think that's a really effective use of the medium to make debates more visual and also to hold the candidate's feet to the fire by showing a clip of something they've said and asking them to reconcile themselves to that. So I think those are all sort of interesting suggestions.
Finally, I would like to see a debate with no moderator. Just set the two candidates out there, give them a time cue, and say, "Okay, guys, you've got an hour or 90 minutes here. Talk about what matters to you." I think that would be fascinating. But they'll never do it.
Q: Why?
A: Because it's too scary. One of the innovations this year in the primary debates was having the candidates question each other, which could theoretically have been interesting. But what really happened was they would say things like, "Now, I believe that we should make the Republican Party more inclusive to Hispanic voters. Wouldn't you agree with that?" [Laughter.] So much for that idea.
I think the fewer rules the better. The rules are put in place by the candidates so that they feel more comfortable. And the extent to which we can strip those away, I think, adds substance to the debates.
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