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

Let the countdown to the showdown begin. After weeks of wrangling between George W. Bush and the bipartisan Commission on

Presidential Debates, the Bush campaign has finally pleaded no más.

Bush and Al Gore will meet for the first of three debates on October 3 at UMass Boston (running mates Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman will also meet once). If past debates are any indication, the television audience will be of Super Bowl or Oscar-night dimensions -- well over 50 million people, and perhaps as many as 100 million.

The presidential debates appear, finally, to have become part of the electoral landscape. But there was a time when they seemed to be in danger of disappearing. In his just-released book, Presidential Debates: Forty Years of High-Risk TV (Columbia University Press), Alan Schroeder writes that Ronald Reagan's decision to debate Walter Mondale in 1984 was perhaps the crucial event.

"I think Reagan may have saved the institution of presidential debates," says Schroeder, 46, speaking at his apartment near Harvard Square. "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."

An assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a former television journalist, Schroeder researched Presidential Debates by watching every presidential and vice-presidential encounter starting with the legendary John F. Kennedy-Richard Nixon face-off in 1960. He also interviewed some 75 journalists, campaign aides, and the like, studied contemporary news coverage, and scoured memoirs and autobiographies.

Schroeder writes that "presidential debates are best apprehended as television shows, governed not by the rules of rhetoric or politics but by the demands of their host medium. The values of debates are the values of television: celebrity, visuals, conflict, and hype."

Schroeder talked about his findings -- and about the Gore-Bush contest for television-performer-in-chief -- in an interview with the Phoenix.

Q: So, was George W. Bush afraid to debate because he's too stupid, or what?

A: [Laughs] Well, he was pretty clearly afraid to debate. First, he was afraid of being outmatched, intellectually and otherwise, by Al Gore. But second, 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: 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 [ahead] that will help put some of this into context. But right now I'm more confused and baffled by it than anything else.

When to watch GEORGE W. Bush and Al Gore will debate three times next month, and their running mates, Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman, will meet once. The debates will not feature any minor-party candidates, the best known of whom are the Green Party's Ralph Nader, the Reform Party's Pat Buchanan, and the Libertarian Party's Harry Browne. The Commission on Presidential Debates -- controlled by the two major parties -- decided earlier this year to invite only those candidates who were registering at least 15 percent in national polls. All four debates will begin at 9 p.m. and will last for 90 minutes. They will be broadcast on PBS and the Big Three commercial networks (in Greater Portland, Channels 6, 8, 10, and 13); the all-news cable outlets CNN, MSNBC, and the Fox News Channel; and C-SPAN. The schedule is as follows: * Tuesday, October 3. Presidential debate, UMass Boston. * Thursday, October 5. Vice-presidential debate, Centre College, Danville, Kentucky. * Wednesday, October 11. Presidential debate, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. * Tuesday, October 17. Presidential debate, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. It's too late to vote for Walter Mondale. But you can watch the 1984 debate in which he exposed Ronald Reagan as a doddering old fool -- as well as a number of other historical debates -- on C-SPAN's Web site, at www.c-span.org/campaign2000/archivedebates.asp. -- DK

Q: Al Gore's reputation as a master debater comes from annihilating flakes like Ross Perot and stiffs like Bill Bradley. How good is he really?

A: Al Gore has been very lucky in his opponents. He has never gone against one of what I would call the 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.

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 Dan Quayle's skin. And he deliberately tailors his debate performance to his opponent.

Q: The first debate now is just a little more than a week away. You write that the most important thing a candidate can do is come across as being comfortable with himself. Does that suggest a hidden advantage for Bush?

A: Possibly that is a hidden advantage for Bush. But it isn't how comfortable they are with themselves in general, but how comfortable they are with themselves at this moment in the campaign. It seems to me that when Bush gets into trouble, he has almost a look of fear in his eyes, and that is not good. You don't want to go into a debate seeming scared or intimidated.

On the other hand, Gore, who never has seemed terribly comfortable in his own skin, seems to be getting more comfortable as a result of his improvements on the campaign trail. I watched Al Gore on David Letterman, and he seemed very comfortable with himself in that milieu, and one would not have thought that possible.

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?

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 be 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: A lot of people, including me, think minor-party candidates such as Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, and Harry Browne should take part, at least in the first debate. And if polling is going to be used to exclude them, it should only be done after they've had a chance to make their case. What's your opinion?

A: I'm going to take the contrarian view here. Because there are so few debates and we have so few opportunities to check out the candidates in this way, I am reluctant to introduce any third-party or independent candidates who don't have a fairly realistic chance of either winning or establishing a movement that might, four years later, lead to a serious party.

In other words, I would say that including Perot in '92 was the right decision. I think that 15 percent in the polls, which is now the established limit for qualifying for the debates, is a little high. A lot of people like five percent, because that's the Federal Election Commission guideline for qualifying for matching funds. But 10 percent seems okay to me.

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 cases. 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 sorts 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: Your take on whether 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 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.

A longer version of this interview appears on Portlandphoenix.com.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com.