Acting, With No Second Takes
Bush and Kerry get set to make their marks in a grand tradition of high-stakes drama
Walter Mondale still remembers the year he both lost and won the presidential debates. It was 1984, and Mondale, the Democratic nominee, was facing off against President Ronald Reagan, the "Great Communicator," in Louisville, Ky.
Reagan had shown himself to be a formidable debater in his matchup against President Jimmy Carter four years before. Asked if he had been nervous about being on the same stage with an incumbent president, Reagan replied: "Not at all. I've been on the same stage with John Wayne."
And, indeed, the same skills necessary for acting are necessary for modern presidential debating: projecting an image, playing to an audience, remembering your lines. The big difference is that in debates there are no second takes. It is all live, and aside from the viewing audience, there is a very specialized audience--the news media--who circle like sharks ready to tear into any perceived flaw, weakness, or error. (After the second debate between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis in 1988, one wag in the press room said, "It was like watching Mike Tyson fight Cicely Tyson!")
But having a good performance one year does not guarantee a good performance four years later. Which is very much on the mind of the Bush debate team, as President Bush and Sen. John Kerry prepare to face off Thursday in Coral Gables, Fla., for the first of three scheduled debates.
Reagan was 73 when he faced Mondale in Louisville, and he came across as even older than his years. In his book Presidential Debates: Forty Years of High-Risk TV, Alan Schroeder writes, "Ronald Reagan would turn in the worst performance of his long career, appearing disengaged, disjointed, and discombobulated against Walter Mondale. . . . Not since Richard Nixon had a presidential debater stepped off the stage so battered."
Even his opponent was shocked. "I remember wondering about Reagan as I came off the platform after that first debate," Mondale told U.S. News recently. "I told my people that I was worried about him, and I really was. If you look at that debate closely, you'll see that I even started letting up on him the last 15 or 20 minutes."
Spin city. Nancy Reagan called it "the worst night of Ronnie's political career." (Lee Atwater, a Reagan strategist, claimed he invented "spin" that night by telling his team to go out and tell the press that Reagan had done magnificently and had won the debate. Spin has become no more reliable since then.) Clearly, a new strategy had to be found. Some 65.1 million people had watched the debate, and just one more followed 14 days later in Kansas City, Mo. For the first one, Reagan's prep team had tried to stuff his head with the facts and figures that incumbent presidents were expected to have at hand. But for the second debate, Reagan heeded the advice of media guru Roger Ailes, who told him, "You didn't get elected on details. You got elected on themes." And Reagan gave a solid performance as a likable father figure whom the nation could trust. He even got off a wowser of a line when, in response to a question about his age, Reagan said, "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."
And with that, Mondale knew it was all over. "In the second debate, he was on his game," Mondale said. "He reassured the public, and that was essentially the end of the campaign. I had been around a long time, so I assumed people knew me. But the debates were really a time when I could have sold myself better."
John Kerry faces the same challenge. Though he, too, has been around a long time, voters do not know him as well as they know George Bush. Says one Democratic strategist involved in past presidential campaigns, "Somehow, Kerry has to reach people so at the end of 90 minutes they say, 'Now, I get a better feel for John Kerry, who he is.' Not his bio, but 'Do I have a sense of this guy?' "
Exposure. Bush's chief strategist, Matthew Dowd, at least partly agrees. "The big thing for Kerry is to be likable and believable," Dowd says. "He must not just win the debate but convince people he should be in their living rooms for the next four years." But one reason that the Bush campaign agreed to three presidential debates is that they think Kerry doesn't gain from public exposure. "I think in the campaign thus far, the more voters have seen of John Kerry, the less they like him," Dowd says.
Top Kerry campaign aide Joe Lockhart sees it differently. "The debates will give the public a chance to size up the two candidates next to each other," he says. "They will judge their strength, knowledge, and philosophy. And it will be one of the few times George Bush will have to defend his record. He is adept at slipping and sliding. He can't do that during a debate."
While some 24 million Americans watched Kerry's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention and some 28 million watched Bush's acceptance speech at the Republican convention this year, the debates will attract many more eyeballs and ears. The largest televised debate audience was 80.6 million for the single Reagan-Carter debate in 1980, and the smallest was 36.3 million for the second Clinton-Dole debate in 1996.
"The audience this year will probably be massive," one Democratic strategist says, "but how many undecideds watch anymore? Rabid partisans will watch, just like they watched the conventions." Debate scholars David Lanoue and Peter Schrott have written: "Clearly a majority of those watching any given presidential debate have already decided how they are going to vote in November. It is quite possible, therefore, that they tune in to political debates for the drama of the live confrontation between two celebrities rather than for education or guidance."
It is not only quite possible but well within the American tradition. The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 (which were for a Senate seat that Lincoln lost) are hailed today as an example of the heights that reason and rhetoric can reach. But that is not why people attended them. "The Lincoln-Douglas encounters were popular mostly because they were excellent theater, and not because what was said was particularly wise or revealing," debate historian Joel Swerdlow has written.
And while much has been made this year about the small number of undecided voters, Dowd believes that the number of "persuadable" or "soft" voters, i.e., voters who can be persuaded to change their current choice, is a significant 10 to 12 percent of the electorate. And it is this audience that both candidates hope to reach during the debate. "The problem for Kerry is that he must solidify his soft voters, and get most of our soft voters, to go ahead," Dowd says. "Our goal is to solidify our soft voters."
Who does well and who does poorly is not a matter merely of debate performance, however, but also of what expectations the press and public hold going into the debate. Many analysts believe that Bush benefited from low expectations four years ago, low expectations that were constantly reinforced by his campaign. When asked in 2000 what Bush had to do in the debates, his chief political guru Karl Rove said, "Survive."
But can Bush low-ball it once again, especially after having done just fine in his debates against Al Gore? One senior Democratic adviser thinks so. "Bush has always benefited from low expectations, and he will once again benefit from that," he says. "No one is ever going to imagine Bush cleaning the clock of his opponent. Instead, they will say, 'The other guy didn't do the knockout.'" Lockhart says, however, "I challenge anyone to find a major debate where George Bush was not considered the winner."
One of Kerry's strengths--and problems in the expectations game--is that he is considered an impressive debater. He has been honing his oratorical skills since prep school (he founded a debate society at St. Paul's in Concord, N.H.) and was a championship debater at Yale, where he helped beat an undefeated team from Oxford. In 1996, Kerry participated in eight televised debates against the popular Republican governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, and many thought Kerry won re-election to the Senate because of his strong debate performance.
According to Kerry's aides, his victory in the debates had as much to do with preparation as it did with skill. "The discipline with which he prepared . . . was incredible," says Natalie Wigotsky Reed, a strategist for Kerry's 1996 campaign. "We didn't work on scripted responses, didn't prepare jokes or pithy statements. [Kerry] doesn't really do that kind of thing. It was more about making sure that he had a grasp of the issues."
On guard. The upcoming presidential debates will freeze a great deal of campaigning as the candidates prepare for their encounters, including elaborate rehearsals with aides standing in for their opponents. Bill Clinton was almost obsessive about his debate prep in 1996--he even rehearsed facial expressions--while his opponent, Bob Dole, did only a modest amount of prepping. "It's important to have good prep and to have people ask you questions you're anticipating from the anchor," Dole says today. "But you don't need to stay up all night trying to glean facts from books in the last 24 hours before the debate. People are always going to try to catch you off guard, and you need to be nimble, calm, and ready to respond."
"Most prep is total bull - - - -," one former Democratic prepper says. "You got it, or you don't got it. You either come across as genuine, or you don't come across as genuine. Reagan was overprogrammed for his first debate with Mondale. They had overstuffed his head with facts. George Bush is a similar sort of guy, and I don't mean that in a negative way. When you ask him a question, he answers it. Maybe you don't agree, but you understand what is behind the words. That is his strength in the debate."
Getting a clear impression of the candidates, where they stand and who they are, is one thing debates can provide, along with moments of high drama. And many people will be watching and listening for the first time. "I think these debates will be very influential, just like always," Dole says. "We junkies follow it every day, and we assume everybody in the country must be sitting on the edge of their chair every day. There are a big chunk of people that are just tuning in."
One who will be tuning in for sure this Thursday will be watching from his home in Minneapolis. "I never miss a debate," Mondale says. "For old hacks like me, it's like the Super Bowl."
With Dan Gilgoff
This story appears in the October 4, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.