Deukmejian Leads Retreat : Candidates Shying Away From the Risky Debate

As a condition for appearing on the ballot in the general election as a candidate for governor of any political party . . . the candidate shall participate in at least three public debates .

That’s the language of Senate Bill No. 1304, introduced into the Legislature nine years ago by a state senator named George Deukmejian.

But that, as they say, was then and now is now.

Deukmejian is no doubt relieved that his proposed mandatory debate statute was rejected. Now, seeking reelection to a second term as governor, he is leading the retreat from campaign debates in California.

He says his opponent, Democrat Tom Bradley, has struck a tone too brutish to be worthy of debate.

It is a theme that other debate-chary politicians have rushed to copy.

In fact, it has become almost faddish to say that an opponent is too mean to debate, and it seems to occur without regard for party affiliation or incumbency. California voters are left with little to anticipate except carefully managed and cautious campaigns for the state’s highest offices.

“This public hankering for debates is a reflection of (a desire to) see the campaign in something other than the context of fund raising and television spots,” said Eugene Lee, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “There’s just not much spontaneous contact and communication between the voter and the candidate.”

And there probably will not be in 1986.

In California’s U.S. Senate contest, Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston won’t debate Republican Rep. Ed Zschau. Like Deukmejian, Cranston says his opponent is interested in smearing him.

Only Wednesday, KABC radio talk show host Michael Jackson was doing a telephone interview with Cranston and managed to get Zschau on the line at the same time. Listeners were poised for the campaign’s first debate-like encounter.

Cranston, however, said this to the invitation: “Thank you very much. I have to run.”

Then he hung up.

In the race for lieutenant governor, Republican challenger Mike Curb says the campaign against him is too “negative, nasty and viciously personal,” so he won’t debate incumbent Democratic Leo T. McCarthy.

Legislative Campaigns

Even candidates for legislative office have seized on the too-mean-to-debate bandwagon. Just this week, Assemblyman Louis J. Papan (D-Millbrae), one of the most aggressively combative men to hold office in California, said he will not debate his opponent for a Bay Area state Senate seat. Papan said rival Quentin Kopp, a San Francisco supervisor, is “unprincipled.”

Are the 1986 elections really so much dirtier than those in the past that they warrant the widespread refusal to debate? After all, there have been debates in contests for major offices in most elections since the 1970s. UC Berkeley’s Lee says that candidates are merely using the negative tone as a “crutch not to debate. And that’s putting it mildly.”

Some interested parties have begun wondering if debates as presently conceived have become too risky for politicians and whether some new way is needed to bring candidates together face to face.

‘Gerald Ford Lost’

“Yes,” Cranston said, “there is some risk. I don’t know of anybody who ever lost a campaign for refusing to debate. But I think Gerald Ford lost the presidency because of his debate remark on Poland.”

The reference was to Ford’s 1976 election debate in which, as an incumbent President, he surprised the world by asserting that Communist Poland was not under Soviet domination.

Cranston is among those who thinks it would be a “better idea” to reshape debates so that candidates do not have to lay all their hard work and ambitions on the line in a single hour or two on statewide television just before Election Day.

Sharing Cranston’s view are Kay Mason of the California League of Women Voters and Vic Biondi of the California Broadcasters Assn., the two organizations involved with the thus-far unsuccessful 1986 candidate debates.

‘Debates Out of Whack’

“We have debates out of whack,” Biondi said. “Debates should be real-world events first because I think to expect candidates to come together at the end (of a campaign) is to ask them to risk too much.”

Mason said: “We would prefer to have a number of debates. We are not in the business of sponsoring debates to see candidates tense and flub up. . . . We just want some spontaneity outside of candidate-controlled events.”

For the time being, however, candidates surveyed on Wednesday said they saw almost no chance for debates. This included campaigners for Deukmejian, who once would have used the power of state law to require gubernatorial debates.

Campaign Manager Larry Thomas said Deukmejian introduced his proposal for mandatory debates in 1977 as a courtesy to his friend, then-San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson, who was thinking of runing for governor against the incumbent, Democrat Edmund G. Brown Jr.

Wilson did not make the finals of the 1978 elections. But he went on four years later to run, debate and beat Brown to become California’s second U.S. senator.

And Deukmejian’s bill?

It suffered the same fate that debate advocates are now having. It went nowhere.