There We Go Again: Shallow TV Debates

A new Times poll finds nearly 75% of voters expecting guidance from the coming televised debates between two presidential candidates.

Time for soul searching, though.

Now that Oprah Winfrey has pulverized Al Gore and George W. Bush in front of homemakers and shut-ins--exposing the vice president as a saintly husband and getting the Texas governor to admit that he lusted in his heart for tacos--do we need presidential debates anymore?

Now that Regis Philbin has ruthlessly bullied Bush into confessing love for his wife, do we really need these extended photo ops in prime time?

Better question: Did we ever need them?

The answer--a deafening no--is affirmed by “Debating Our Destiny,” tonight’s revealing, highly entertaining PBS documentary that finds Jim Lehrer gently chatting up presidential and vice presidential debaters going back 24 years. The 2 1/2-hour program makes its point not overtly but by dwelling on debate strategies, fluffs and other memorable debate sound bites because, you must infer, they are all that’s memorable about these overrated TV shows on which contemplation and being slow to pull the trigger brands a candidate as a dullard.

“They force you to come to terms with what you really believe,” TV debater deluxe Bill Clinton tells Lehrer while keeping a straight face and thinking, surely, that he mustn’t fault a process that his stablemate, Gore, hopes will drive a stake through Bush’s candidacy.

But whoa!

Actually, debates make candidates come to terms only with television and voter expectations in an age that celebrates ease with video over intimacy with ideas, as office-seekers polish their one-liners with Oprah, Regis and comedy’s late-nighters before taking their acts to prime time.

No wonder that televised debates are now election furniture to the extent that a presidential campaign would seem barren without them. And that NBC and Fox are being unfairly criticized in some circles for saying they will not carry Tuesday’s opening rendition of dueling candidates.

As if having the debate available on a spate of other channels were not enough and even more duplication of the same event would make voters smarter.

If not addicting, these debates exact dependence. And a candidate who runs from or tries to limit them, as Bush has seemed to do, risks appearing insecure, even weak, fearful and secretive (perhaps a closet Captain Queeg), although he may be twice as qualified as his opponent.

Low-key Lehrer, who anchors “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” on PBS, has participated in six previous televised candidate forums as a journalist and will moderate this year’s trio of Gore-Bush clashes. CNN anchor Bernard Shaw, himself joining debate lore after his famous 1988 question to Michael Dukakis about capital punishment, is set to moderate the only announced TV forum with vice presidential hopefuls.

Only one of Lehrer’s subjects here expresses flat-out opposition to candidates sparring on TV in these prescribed formats. “It’s show business,” says George Bush the elder, who debated Geraldine Ferraro as Ronald Reagan’s running mate in 1984 before facing Dukakis on TV as a presidential candidate four years later and Clinton and Ross Perot in 1992.

“It’s not really debating or getting into issues,” adds Bush, knowing from personal experience that heavily coached candidates deliver “rehearsed” performances that don’t necessarily reflect one’s ability to lead the nation, even though these diversions are adored by media and voters who relish a good flub on live TV.

As when inarticulate Gerald Ford appeared to cavalierly dismiss Soviet influence in East Europe during his 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter, and Ford’s quipping running mate, Bob Dole, seemed to blame the Democrats for World War II and the Korean War when he faced Walter Mondale.

And also when Bush twice looked at his watch while facing Clinton and Perot in 1992, appearing not only disengaged but anxious to get the heck out of there. Which he was, he tells Lehrer. “Was I glad when the damn thing was over? Yah!”

His anti-debate philosophy appears deeply felt. “If there is a guy who stuttered and couldn’t finish a sentence and yet is brilliant in his contribution as a public servant or academic or whatever,” says Bush, “why should that one thing be mandatory? Why should a person be burdened with . . . the decision to have to debate?”

A candidate unable to complete a sentence would be pushing the envelope. Yet Bush is right about these debates rewarding glossy camera skills over substance. When he said this, though, did he really mean it or was he worried about the prospect of his salami-tongued son getting chewed up when going one on one with the glibber Gore on TV? One hopes the former.

Three surviving former debaters are missing from Sunday’s program. Gore and Perot declined to take part, and Lloyd Bentsen, the Dukakis running mate who stuffed hapless Dan Quayle a dozen years ago with that devastating line about John Kennedy, begged off because of ill health. Ronald Reagan’s reflections were taped a decade ago, before the onset of his Alzheimer’s disease.

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Although Clinton insists to Lehrer that debates are “very important” in terms of substance, that hypothesis appears tainted this election season by Tuesday’s exclusion of the Green Party’s Ralph Nader and Reform Party’s Pat Buchanan, minority candidates capable of expanding the discussion uncomfortably beyond the procedural.

Nor is it verified tonight in separate interviews with the president and other former debaters, some of them delightfully candid.

“That one hurt,” Mondale recalls about the much-older Reagan boomeranging the age issue back at him with a funny line (“I will not exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience”) in 1984, two weeks after he had clobbered the unfocused, distracted incumbent in their first televised meeting.

In their second debate, the camera showed Mondale smiling broadly at Reagan’s obviously scripted joke. “But if you looked close,” Mondale remembers, “you could see some tears.” Following that, he says, “I was almost certain the campaign was over, and it was.”

Submarined on that night by a joke.

Just as Jimmy Carter acknowledges the obvious here, that he erred in his 1980 debate with Reagan when commenting stiffly that his daughter, Amy, then age 13, had brought up “nuclear weaponry” while discussing with him seminal issues facing the nation. That earned him wide ridicule, although neither it nor Reagan’s famed “there you go again” put-down were reasons for Carter’s defeat.

On the other hand, Dukakis seems still unable to quite fathom the fuss over his swift, dispassionate response to Shaw’s question tied to his opposition to capital punishment: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis [the candidate’s wife] were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

Even more shocking to some than the question was the candidate’s mechanical “No” answer that he gave without even a millisecond of reflection. Was this guy a cold fish or something? No, just not an actor.

Dukakis explains to Lehrer that he’d been asked nearly the same question so many times that he didn’t need to think it over. He was ready for it. Yet this was one of those rare debate moments when pausing to weigh the question and pander to expectations would have been politically wiser. If only Dukakis had expressed his husbandly devotion and also acted a bit by stroking his chin, speaking emotionally and faking wiping away a tear.

Although not winning him the election, it might have earned him a job in Hollywood, which is what success in these debates qualifies a candidate for instead of the White House.

* “Debating Our Destiny” can be seen tonight at 9 on KCET-TV. The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.