Start with my people-the press. Even with the most conscientious preparation and self-effacing (self-effacing.?) attitude on the part of the questioners, what you have when you have four journalists in addition to the candidates is six egos and six agendas instead of an almost manageable two. When we in the business see our colleagues who have participated in one of these events any time during the week after a debate, we are expected to say but one thing: “Good questions!” That doesn’t necessarily mean that they elicited interesting, useful or revealing answers from the candidates.
The compliment means the panelist had a kind of unusual formulation, one the others didn’t think of and that was designed to trip up the candidate. The other preferred type of question is the show-off one which reveals the extensive knowledge and profound moral seriousness of the questioner. The candidates are performing for the voters. The journalists are performing for their professional buddies and bosses. I don’t mean to suggest that all journalist-questioners on all debates have been like this, but surely enough have been to characterize press participation as by and large distracting and unhelpful.
It also has these disadvantages, not from the candidates’ point of view, but from that of the watching public. First, for all the tough-guy questioning mode, the take-your-turn format allows the candidates to escape prolonged questioning or pursuit on a particular issue. Just when things are getting interesting and the initial posturing and palaver have been challenged or rejected, the subject gets changed. Given such a format, it is all but inevitable that too much will ride on the single sound-bite answer, played and replayed endlessly in the aftermath of the debate. Ronald Reagan’s “There you go again” and Lloyd Bentsen’s “I knew Jack Kennedy…” are prime examples. I think no one can remember– and could not two days after those debates–anything else that was said.
It has been pointed out again and again that the amount of information possessed and flung about by the debating candidate does not correlate with his chance of winning the exchange. Jimmy Carter had an enormous store of knowledge about the issues, but was trounced by Reagan, who seemed more self-possessed, confident and common-sense reasonable. These impressions, as distinct from the actual substance of answers, can be critical. It is often forgotten that before their first televised debate, it was thought that Kennedy was a young, unschooled and unready senator who could not conceivably hold his own with the more experienced Nixon. The mere fact of his seeming at least Nixon’s equal in the exchanges and his less uptight bearing transformed people’s impression of him. It seems as though the worst thing a contender can do is to get overprogrammed and as Reagan did before one debate with Walter Mondale, which he lost, and which Gerald Ford clearly did before the debate he lost to Carter.
The Ford debacle seems to me to illustrate what is wrong with the old format. Ford, you will remember, got into this impossible, truly stupid bind of insisting again and again that Poland was not a country under Communist domination. It seemed incomprehensible. Now the truth is that Gerald Ford certainly knew as well as every fourth grader in the United States did that Poland was a Communist-governed country. But he was wound up so tight, briefed and rebriefed and briefed once more so stupefyingly, that he just kind of automatically gave the answer to another question than the one he had been asked. He was seeking to say that the Polish people had never in their hearts accepted the communist doctrine, but he was so glazed and preprogrammed that he just kept repeating the answer to a question that had not been asked, instead of hearing the one that had been put. As it is with the clever, triumphant moments, so, too, the spectacular disasters, of which this is the paramount example, tend to be all anyone remembers about a given debate.
You may be sure that for some time now the candidates have been boning up for whatever may come, that the briefers and play actors are doing run-throughs with them, that the debate books with their presumably cunning answers to any weird thing that may come up are being prepared and perfected and studied. The old format with journalists doing the questioning puts a premium on this kind of prepping. It turns the debates into prospective sudden-death contests in which the most irrelevant subject or the most accidental exchange can really determine the outcome. It is for this reason that the “spin doctors” of the candidates themselves perform with such intensity immediately following the debates, trying to control the public’s own perception of what it actually saw.
It seemed for a while this year as though things might be different. The single-moderator debate could do more than 50 clever, roughneck journalistic questions to probe the candidates’ genuine knowledge and understanding of the issues before them. In 90 minutes a lot of the posturing and pretense and little studied dissembling just has to burn off. Both men could be pressed by the moderator and, importantly, each other to provide real answers. At the end of such an exchange we might even know something we didn’t know before about their capacities and their fitness for the office. You’d have thought that real debates would have stood a pretty good chance of happening in the year of the angry electorate when politics-and-gameplaying-as-usual were supposed to have been a thing of the past.
