Of Debatable Use : Presidential Campaign Forums Need Revamping, Panelists Say

Beyond the sound bites, beneath the pancake makeup and behind the practiced facades that Bill Clinton and Bob Dole will don for this evening’s second and final campaign debate are two men who would be president.

All the pretense must be stripped away if future debates are ever to show Americans who their candidates truly are, political pundits agreed Tuesday in a daylong conference at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

The conference panelists concurred that presidential debates are not what they used to be.

They are nothing like the intense, focused, no-holds-barred arguments over slavery that voters witnessed between young Abraham Lincoln and incumbent Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas, CNN anchor Bernard Shaw said in a speech opening the conference.

Nor are they full of shocking moments, such as Ronald Reagan roaring, “I paid for this microphone!” as his 1980 primary debate-closing remarks were cut off when the clock ran out. Or 1988 vice presidential hopeful Sen. Lloyd Bentsen berating his junior opponent, Sen. Dan Quayle, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

“The problem is that all of it takes place on television, all of it is memorized,” lamented USC law professor Susan Estrich, architect of Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential campaign.

And former Reagan press aide Lyn Nofziger said, “I’d like to see a real debate.

“I think these press conferences and joint appearances, they’re silly, silly [and] they don’t tell us anything,” Nofziger told the audience of more than 300. “Just put a fence between them, tell them not to hit each other and let them go at it.”

The conference traced the history of modern presidential debates from their 1960 origin when Vice President Richard Nixon faced young Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy.

“We talked for years about who won that debate,” said Don Hewitt, who directed that debate and is now executive producer of “60 Minutes.” “They say if you listened on radio, Nixon won, and if you watched on TV, Kennedy won.”

The debate put the young senator on the same level as the more experienced vice president. And it gave him an advantage, Hewitt said, because many viewers regarded the well-tanned Kennedy as more attractive than Nixon, who refused to wear makeup and appeared pasty-faced and sweaty during the debate.

The Kennedy-Nixon face-off also launched the television era of American politics, marking the first forceful use of the medium that now rules--and often muddies--presidential campaigns, the panelists said.

Debate performance sometimes underscored campaign ratings, as when President Gerald Ford fumbled his answer in a debate with former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter over a question on Communist control of Eastern Europe.

“Ford had some obstacles to overcome,” said Henry Trewhitt, a panelist in the Ford-Carter debate and a 1984 Reagan-Walter Mondale debate.

“There were the presidential pardons and the perceptions that he was something of a klutz because he had been falling down stairs,” Trewhitt said. “That only confirmed the perceptions in the public that he was behind Jimmy Carter in the polls.”

Debates offer presidential hopefuls an unparalleled chance to show themselves to the public, press their platforms and erase doubts the voters might have.

Reagan knew “the age question” would arise when he ran for president in 1984 at 73. So he defused the issue quickly in the debate, joking, “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

But the debates also fed the rise of the sound bite, as when Reagan asked the viewers in 1980 to ask themselves, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

Now, the panelists lamented Tuesday, sound bites rule the day.

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Most modern debates put the candidates in front of a panel of journalists, then give them 30, 60 or 90 seconds to respond to questions. The candidates rehearse their responses for weeks with debate coaches and playbooks, and partisan spin doctors declare their own sides the winner afterward, no matter how the candidate performed.

Because television has become Americans’ primary source for information about the candidates--and debates the one thing they watch closest--they must be restructured and stripped of pretense, many of the panelists said.

The only way to break the sound bite pattern is to let debate moderators ask follow-up questions--to keep candidates from veering off topic and into rehearsed speeches, they said.

Or to let candidates question each other in an open format, minus the time clock and panelists altogether.

The “town meeting” format set to be used tonight, in which citizens pose the questions and candidates often are caught off-guard, is among the best, said Paul Kirk, former Democratic Party chairman and co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates.

It can lay bare their character, as when a young woman asked wealthy President George Bush in a 1992 debate how the recession affected him--and he balked twice and nervously glanced at his watch.

And, Kirk said, “The ‘town meeting’ gives these two candidates the ability to connect with the American people.”