This year’s US presidential debates begin in a fortnight. In the abstract they ought to redirect the race towards the “issues” – health insurance, affordable energy, withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, the economy – and lessen the current partisan bickering, but the history of televised presidential debates (there have been nine series since Richard Nixon first took on John F. Kennedy) suggests otherwise. Instead of deepening and widening the political dialogue, televised debates tend to emphasise character issues and strengthen the standing of the candidate who appears to have the better temperament, rather than the one with the stronger arguments.
In the age of television “[w]e don’t watch debates to learn what someone thinks about Social Security,” writes James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly, “We watch to see how the contenders look next to their opponents, how they react when challenged, how well or poorly they come up with the words we later see in print.” Nixon famously lost a debate because he looked unshaven, Reagan swept aside Carter with a throwaway phrase that made him look carping (“There you go again”), Dukakis appeared eerily calm while listening to a hypothetical question about someone raping his wife, and Gore huffed and puffed too much against a tin-eared and leaden-tongued George W. Bush in the 2000 debates. (Intriguingly, Fallows has pointed out elsewhere that Bush was noticeably different when debating rivals to become governor of Texas: clever, polysyllabic and well-informed. Contrary to expectations Bush as dimwit played very well against the know-it-all demeanour of Al Gore).
Lengthy speeches used to be a normal part of American politics. In 1858, when Abraham Lincoln challenged Stephen Douglas for a seat in the US senate, the race was decided by seven debates in which each candidate spoke uninterrupted for an hour, listened to his rival for ninety minutes, and then rose again for half-an-hour of rebuttal. Today, however, American politics offers a candidate little more than a few memorable phrases in which to make his pitch to the electorate. And so, although there have been no fewer than 47 intra-party debates in this primary season, the next election will probably be won or lost on a handful of soundbites. Some of this is due to audience fatigue – even the most devoted partisans would agree that the endless questioning has yielded precious little genuine entertainment – but there are also other forces at play. James Fallows recently watched every one of these primary debates and reached a number of sobering conclusions about what constitutes an effective debating style in the current marketplace of public opinion.
In televised debates, viewer sympathy is everything and it is more often earned by one-liners and gestures — however rehearsed — that suggest a candidate’s personality, rather than by dint of real intelligence or sophistication. In 2004, for instance, John Kerry seemed far more knowledgeable than President Bush on most of the issues of the day, but Republican strategists correctly concluded that this could be used against Kerry, to paint him as someone who was too subtle for the hard choices of a post 9/11 president. The more nuanced Kerry’s positions became the easier he was to dismiss as a “flip-flopper” who was “for the war in Iraq before he was against it.”
Oddly enough, this year’s Democratic party debates were settled along similar lines. Although Obama was noticeably weaker than Edwards and Clinton in the spontaneous give-and-take of debate, he tended to outscore both of them in terms of public perceptions of his character. In early debates, his professorial manner came over as too cerebral and long-winded and he looked indecisive against Senator Edwards’s trial-lawyer patter, and inexperienced compared with Clinton’s easy familiarity with policy details. Obama’s pacing improved as the campaign progressed, but it was really his long set-speeches outside of the debates – particularly his epic speech on race relations — that established him as a serious candidate. Two notable exceptions to this pattern came when he traded insults with Clinton in a moment of pique (referring dismissively to “back in the days when you were on the Board of Walmart”), and when he deflected a question about how many of his senior advisers were former Clinton supporters with the marvellous retort: “Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me as well.” Fallows comments that the “transcript doesn’t convey the gleam that immediately came into his eye as he conceived [this] reply, or the easy, just faintly aggressive smile with which he delivered it. This looked to me like the moment when he took command.”
Soundbites have arguably become even more important since the nominations were settled. The Democrats know this to their cost. Having just concluded a well-staged convention full of star-power and complex, high-flown speeches, they find themselves scrambling to offset the surprise announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain’s vice-presidential pick. Much of the Obama-Biden ticket’s vaunted momentum seems to have vanished in a single evening of shrill conservatism near the end of a remarkably lacklustre GOP convention. Palin’s dramatic emergence on the national stage — apparently unencumbered by an untidy family life, singular inexperience and a surprising array of hardline opinions — has emboldened the Republicans in unexpected ways. Her speech’s half-truths and exaggerations have already been countered in the mainstream press, but the echoes of her eager sarcasm linger on.
Palin has become the rallying point for the newly energized Republican base but the secret of her success is all too well known to anyone who voted for Al Gore and John Kerry. Their ill-fated campaigns should have taught the Democrats that the scare tactics of the old culture wars are alive and well. One of Karl Rove’s most telling insights into the streetfighting aspects of American politics was that the best smears are often those with the least substance. Most of Palin’s applause lines built on this knowledge. In one of her more audacious passages, she quipped that “a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening…” This folksy-sounding sneer turns out on closer inspection to be almost a haiku of classic Obamaphobia, stressing his apparent inexperience (law-professor, Senator, bestselling author — but “no major legislation”), hypocrisy (Rev Wright, Nafta), elitism (“working people” is almost political shorthand for poor and white), and untrustworthiness (too “exotic” for “average” Americans to trust, too clever, too foreign). Obama survived similar smears in his long fight against Hillary Clinton, but many Democrats fear that the strategy might work in a general election.
If it does, they will only have themselves to blame. Gore and Kerry lost narrowly because their opponents had a greater stomach for the divisive, fearmongering tactics in America’s culture wars. Obama ought to win big if his candidacy, as many hoped, genuinely holds the promise of a new kind of politics. But the Democrats’ infighting has already exposed him on so many fronts – effectively writing the Republicans’ attacks in advance – that it seems rather naïve and self-serving of them to cry foul at this late stage. To live up to his early promise, Obama needs to out-manoeuvre his opponents yet again, to dodge their traps – like the obvious bait about “inexperience” – and perhaps even to set a few of his own. American politics isn’t going to become a gentlemanly game overnight, and there will be plenty more “gotcha” moments and slips of the tongue in the next few weeks (last weekend, for example, a weary-looking Obama spoke about his “Muslim faith” to George Stephanopoulos, who quickly corrected the gaffe). The Democrats must be prepared for this, and quickly counter the Swiftboating of their candidate — especially since so many of them have helped lay the groundwork for it.
This has already been an ugly election season and it is bound to get uglier. Fortunately, Obama’s grace under pressure bodes well for his immediate future, especially if the debate eventually comes down to character. John McCain’s campaign manager recently said: “This campaign is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” Predictably, the remark has drawn a great deal of criticism.
It certainly suggests a remarkable level of cynicism and self-assurance within the McCain camp. But they would do well to look back over the last few months a little more carefully. Hillary Clinton’s death march to the nomination ultimately failed because voters decided that Obama’s character trumped her experience. Senator McCain, aged, irascible, mired in the legacy of an unpopular president and decades of Washington’s “politics as usual” may soon discover that he has repeated her mistake.
