For a Change, Real Winner Was Media

Happy days are here again. Up there in New Hampshire, that is, at least temporarily.

Starting with the presidential debates of 1960 when a five o’clock shadow blackened Richard Nixon’s effort against John F. Kennedy, such televised face-offs have become the common currency of electioneering.

The media and voters appear to love these formal gatherings of candidates, and no wonder. They’re often entertaining and sometimes even memorable, as in Lloyd Bentsen stuffing Dan Quayle or Ronald Reagan repeatedly telling Jimmy Carter, “There you go again.”

Yet typically, they’re also the big redundancies of presidential campaigns, resolving nothing except which candidate gives a better performance in front of the lens on a given night after being prepped and rehearsed by professional advisors and handlers.

Like television itself, they stress glossy camera skills over substance. Unlike the Oval Office, where you’d hope decisions are made thoughtfully after weighing all options, TV debates favor the hair-trigger one-liner over contemplation. Reflection is the kiss of death. The candidate who pauses longer than three seconds before answering is indexed in our memories under foggy and indecisive.

Accolades almost always go to the one able to articulate complex ideas simplistically. As if that would make this a safer, healthier, more equitable nation.

Which is why Wednesday night’s CNN encounter at Dartmouth College between Vice President Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley--the first of their many scheduled duels en route to the Democratic presidential nomination--was so rewarding. As foreplay for the coming New Hampshire primary, they were able to state some of their positions in an environment that was cordial and even dignified.

Democrats will make their own decisions about the candidates. But no one could say the atmosphere wasn’t presidential.

Same time, same place, meanwhile, Republican hopefuls were to rumble on CNN themselves Thursday night, minus front-running Texas Gov. George Bush, and also without the final game of the World Series as competition. The GOP event was still in the future as this was written.

The Gore-Bradley meeting, though, was much more of a town hall-style forum than a debate, with candidates alternating in answering questions from the audience without aggressively beating up on each other. The tone was civil, the questions good, the answers mostly responsive and free of bombast, with Bradley ever the minimalist and Gore a life of the party come-lately in his quest to shed his stolid image.

What marked this event as special? It was less what Gore and Bradley did during this event put on by CNN and Manchester’s WMUR-TV, however, than what occurred on the media front in the aftermath.

On TV, at least, there they didn’t go again.

Perhaps they were preoccupied by the World Series, perhaps their minds were on JonBenet Ramsey. In any case, it was as if someone had declared a media moratorium on stupid comments about Gore vs. Bradley.

That included Thursday’s network morning shows, although on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” host Charles Gibson did ask George Stephanopoulos: “Do you have any sense of what played best to the television audience?” He didn’t. As if he could.

On the “Larry King Live” hour that followed the forum, there also was none of the customary instant wisdom from knee-jerk gasbags. You know the ones, the thumbs-up/thumbs-down crowd that proclaims who won and who lost, who looked good and who didn’t, who flubbed and who flowered, who got off good lines and who didn’t, who did himself some good and who didn’t.

When pressed by King to declare a winner, always-measured CNN senior news analyst Jeff Greenfield responded with a prizefight-scoring analogy: “I cannot stand this notion of the 10-point must system. It’s mindless. We’re gonna do it. But not today.”

Ignoring that stiff left jab, King kept coming. To Gloria Borger of U.S. News & World Report: “Was this, Gloria, in your opinion a good night for the former senator?” She replied that both candidates did well.

To the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward: “Did anybody lose tonight?” Woodward thought that maybe the loser was Pat Buchanan, who had bolted the GOP for the Reform Party. But no one else.

King was getting desperate.

He had already asked Borger, who was in Hanover: “What . . . was the buzz among the journalists?” She buzzed barely at all.

He had already asked Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell, general chairman of the Democratic National Committee: “Do you think your party came out well tonight all the way around?” As if he would say no.

He had already asked former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, a Democrat: “Toward the liberal end of your party, do you think that anyone there, like Warren Beatty, might have been dismayed?” She really couldn’t say.

After a caller noted that Gore had been sweating, King was down to just about his last question. And it went to Greenfield: “What about appearances, Al Gore’s new look, his khaki suit, his movements on stage?” Greenfield made a joke.

In a 35-minute segment that should have lasted 10, at least King hadn’t asked whether Gore vs. Bradley had affected the outcome of the World Series. Or whether it mattered how many times each man blinked.

Richards did make one prediction that resonated, though. “I think,” she said, “this thing’s gonna heat up before it’s over.”

And if the candidates heat up, count on the media boiling over, too. For the moment, though, happy days were here again, and it couldn’t have been more refreshing.