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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 32

THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

What Debates Don't Tell Us


Memorable more for one-liners than for substance, they are poor
guides to performance in the Oval Office

By WALTER SHAPIRO


    They began, in a sense, as a way to fill the TV void left
by the quiz-show scandals of the late 1950s. How could the
networks re-create those dramatic question-and-answer
confrontations that had been so popular with the viewers?
Finally, two years after the $64,000 Question was yanked off the
air, the format resurfaced in 1960 in a new high-minded
incarnation featuring the grandest prize of all -- a four-year
lease on a pretentiously formal 18th century residence in
Washington.

    The first contestants were two articulate World War II
veterans named Jack and Dick, who had primed for their moment
in the spotlight as if going into combat. Instead of being
cloistered in isolation booths like the early quiz-show
participants, the two men stood behind individual lecterns, as
solitary as Hemingway heroes. The questions -- posed by a
distinguished panel of journalists to reassure viewers that
nothing was rigged -- demanded both a detailed knowledge of
government programs (farm subsidies and the Tennessee Valley
Authority) and a travel writer's mastery of obscure foreign
locales (Ghana, Laos and Formosa).

    By the narrow calculus of television ratings, the four
Kennedy-Nixon debates were a glorious success. But for those who
longed for something grander, for rhetoric that might rival the
Lincoln-Douglas encounters of 1858, for crystal-clear arguments
over relevant issues, for clues about potential for presidential
leadership, those inaugural debates were a bitter
disappointment. The tenor was set with the first reporter's
question, a classic softball lobbed right at Senator Kennedy:
"Why do you think people should vote for you rather than the
Vice President?"

    Little, alas, has changed in the 32 years since Kennedy and
Nixon squabbled interminably about whether to defend two
worthless chunks of rock off the coast of China called Quemoy
and Matsu. Presidential debates have consistently failed to give
voters what they need to make an informed decision: a road map
to chart what the next four years would be like with each
candidate as President.

    For all the talk about testing character and leadership,
debates have been about as reliable a predictive tool as
newspaper horoscopes. In 1960 neither Kennedy nor Nixon hinted
at the looming U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In four debates,
they fielded only two questions on civil rights. In 1980 Ronald
Reagan got off scot-free when he confidently forecast that his
economic elixir of tax cuts and defense hikes would miraculously
produce "a balanced budget by 1983, if not earlier." At least
in 1988 Ann Compton of ABC deserved credit for pressing George
Bush: "Isn't the phrase `no new taxes' misleading the voters?"
With mangled syntax, Bush responded lamely, "No because that's
-- that -- I'm pledged to that."

    But no one recalls that telling exchange in the second
debate because it came just minutes after moderator Bernard Shaw
asked Michael Dukakis the Big Question presumably all America
wanted answered: "If Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered,
would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?"
Even with four years of hindsight, that hypothetical query still
chills with its smarmy invasiveness and macabre posturing.
Politically, of course, Dukakis' unemotional, uninflected,
unyielding answer ("No, I don't, Bernard") was in effect his
concession speech. But nothing, save the yen for televised blood
sports, justified the original question; capital punishment is
an issue of only tangential relevance to the duties of any
President.

    That is the inherent problem with presidential debates:
what is remembered is the theatrics, the contrived drama, the
carefully rehearsed sound bites. Lost in the spin control are
those rare insightful moments that foreshadow what a would-be
President actually will do in office, the crises he will face
and, yes, the fateful errors of judgment that are to be his
legacy.

    Buried in the two 1988 presidential debates, for example,
are hints at some of the foreign policy missteps that would
shape Bush's four years in office. Bush painted this cheery
portrait of emerging freedoms in China less than a year before
democracy was massacred in Tiananmen Square: "The changes in
China since Barbara and I lived there are absolutely amazing in
terms of incentives and partnerships and things of that nature."
No reporter was clairvoyant enough to ask the Vice President to
assess the intentions of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. But
Bush brought up Iraq himself as a way of dodging a politically
tricky question about arms sales to Iran. To the Vice President
in 1988 -- two years before Iraq invaded Kuwait -- stability in
the Persian Gulf was a triumph of Reagan-era diplomacy. "Should
we have listened to my opponent who wanted to send the U.N. into
the Persian Gulf?" Bush asked rhetorically. "Or in spite of the
mistakes of the past, are we doing better there? How is our
credibility with the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council]countries on
the western side of the gulf? Is Iran talking to Iraq about
peace? You judge on the record."

    Bush would probably prefer not to be judged on his record
of prophecy regarding Iraq and China. But at least those
subjects were raised. What comes through from the 1988 debates
is the stunning irrelevancy of most of the exchanges. Never
mentioned was the fast-escalating savings-and-loan crisis. Not
a word was devoted to the economic challenge from Japan. There
was never more than a hint, even from Dukakis, that paper
prosperity might soon give way to remorseless recession.

    Like quiz contestants nervously blurting out wrong answers,
some incumbent Presidents have lost debates because of
pressure-of-the-moment gaffes. Jerry Ford made his bizarre 1976
declaration that Poland was not a communist country and
foolishly stuck to it for five days because he misremembered a
briefing on the Helsinki Accords, which implied recognition of
Soviet control of Eastern Europe. Did it really make substantive
-- as opposed to political -- difference that in 1980 Jimmy
Carter blurted out that he had been discussing arms control with
his precocious 13-year-old daughter Amy?

    MANY PREVIOUS DEBATES have been decided by a flick of the
wit, a clever one-liner that would have political resonance
long after the substance of the debate was forgotten. Ronald
Reagan, no surprise, was a master at these prerehearsed quips.
Facing the beleaguered Carter in their single 1980 debate,
Reagan deftly showed he could be a reassuring presence, an equal
to an incumbent President, by artfully deploying that carefully
calibrated put-down line, "There you go again."

    But in 1984 Reagan stumbled through his first debate with
Walter Mondale, losing the train of his argument, mangling
phrases and making absurd claims (example: he did not attend
religious services because "I pose a [security] threat to
several hundred people if I go to church"). This performance
prompted fears that at 73 Reagan was too old and doddering for
the office. Given the record of his second term (his fogginess
on the details of Iran-contra, Nancy Reagan's astrologer), these
turned out to be legitimate concerns. But they vanished in the
second debate as soon as Reagan delivered his practiced crack
that he had no plans to "exploit for political purposes my
opponent's youth and inexperience." What was ironic was that
Reagan's closing statement in that same debate, a scarcely
coherent ramble about a trip down the Pacific Coast Highway,
turned out to be a telling illustration of the vagaries of the
President's mind.

    Part of the problem rests with the way all debates since
1960 have been organized. Multiple questions and time-limited
answers (no candidate has ever been granted more than three
minutes to respond; this year the maximum is two minutes) do not
lend themselves to serious exploration of issues. Also,
reporters have often been maladroit questioners -- precious
minutes were squandered in the second 1988 debate when Bush and
Dukakis were asked to name their heroes.

    After the 1960 debates, Douglass Cater of the Reporter
magazine -- one of the panelists -- noted how quickly Kennedy
and Nixon "mastered its special form of gamesmanship" this new
political medium required. "No matter how narrow or broad the
question," Cater wrote, "each of them extracted his last second
of allotted image projection in making his response." If
anything, the candidates have grown more adroit over the years.
That is why these political quiz shows have come to resemble
that other icon of the TV age -- the Super Bowl: overhyped,
overcoached and ultimately underwhelming.