DAVID SMICK, then an aide to Jack Kemp, invited a group of reporters and columnists to his house in October 1980 to watch the debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. “Every one of them thought Carter won,” Smick says. So did I. As a political reporter for the Baltimore Sun, I watched the debate in the newsroom, wrote about it, then late that night drove to Philadelphia to cover another campaign story. On the way, I listened to Larry King’s old radio show. From all over America, calls showered in. Practically every caller had loved Reagan’s performance in the debate and loathed Carter’s. Many derided Carter’s reference to his daughter Amy’s concerns about nuclear proliferation.
The reaction to presidential debates inside the Beltway, in the political community, and among journalists is often wrong. We know now, of course, that Reagan won a smashing victory in the 1980 debate, blew open a close race, and went on to defeat Carter in a landslide seven days later. Millions of voters saw things in the debate that the political cognoscenti missed. It happened again, to a lesser extent, in the first debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush on October 3. Most people involved in politics, including many conservatives, thought Bush’s performance was disastrous and Gore won easily. We already know how wrong that verdict was.
So why the disparity in judging presidential debates? Those who work in politics full-time view debates like a boxing match. To decide on a winner, they keep track of the number of blows struck and count up who took the most rounds (or separate issues). In the second Bush-Gore debate last week, for example, Dan Balz of the Washington Post noted that “Gore began to score points with repeated criticism of Bush’s record in Texas.” Most voters don’t see debates that way.
What voters draw from watching a presidential debate is a general perception of the candidates. It’s an “impression game,” says Michael Deaver, the ex-Reagan adviser. Details, important to the political crowd, don’t matter much to average Americans. They don’t watch that intently and they’re distrustful of the facts and figures politicians spew anyway. “There’s a generic skepticism,” says pollster Scott Rasmussen of Charlotte, N.C. By larding his debate performances with details, Gore hasn’t helped himself.
Even when a candidate seems to be hammering away on a point successfully, he may be creating a bad impression. In the first debate, Gore repeatedly attacked Bush’s tax cut as heavily tilted toward the top one percent of income earners. Bush not only didn’t respond directly, he appeared unable to. This prompted Gore to repeat his point over and over. Voters must have concluded: Gore hates tax cuts. “You couldn’t watch that debate and believe you’re going to get a tax cut from Gore,” says GOP consultant Jeffrey Bell. Yes, Gore said he favors “targeted” tax cuts. But those are seen as tax cuts other people get.
Rather than details, what matters are themes and concepts. Watching Reagan’s 1980 performance again, I was amazed at how brilliantly he stressed themes. At one point, he uncorked this in defense of his tax cut: “I would like to ask the president why it is inflationary to let the people keep more of their own money and spend it the way that they like, and it isn’t inflationary to let him take that money and spend it the way he wants?” Bush is no Reagan, but he got a few themes across in debates one and two: He’s not from Washington, he’s the outsider, his tax cut is for all tax-payers, he’s a conservative. Gore made the mistake Carter made. He talked up program after program. Individually, each might be popular, but the cumulative impression was Gore as a man of Washington and of big government. Or as Reagan said of Carter in their debate: “He seeks the solution to anything as another opportunity for a federal government program.”
Everyone knows personality is important. Bush conveys his by constantly smiling and through folksy guy talk, and average folks react favorably. He’s not witty, but he’s extraordinarily likeable. Gore, at least in the debates, isn’t. He toned down his belligerence in the second debate without making himself more appealing. But there’s a trait that’s far more important than personality. It’s temperament. It’s a quality of leadership that people notice when they get their first extended glimpse of candidates in debates. Journalists and the political community usually aren’t aware of it. They’ve seen so much of the candidates beforehand that temperament slips under their radar. The press obsesses on how smart candidates are. Voters watching a presidential debate are more interested in temperament.
Oliver Wendell Holmes famously commented that Franklin D. Roosevelt had “a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament.” He meant the way FDR carried himself, his sense of ease. FDR was sober without being pompous, serious without appearing to take himself too seriously. In the 1980 debate, Deaver says, Reagan came across similarly. “The impression was, this guy is calm, he has grace, he is reasonable,” according to Deaver. The media and the Beltway crowd missed this entirely, thinking Carter was smarter than Reagan and naturally carried the debate.
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich thinks you can catch a peek of a candidate’s temperament by turning off the sound on your television. Bush doesn’t rise to the FDR or Reagan level, for sure, but it’s here that Gore has faltered badly. In the first debate, it wasn’t just the sighing. It was his exaggerated facial expressions, his nervous moving around behind the podium like a man needing to go to the bath-room, his tearing of sheets of paper, his interruptions. He appeared overwrought. Bush didn’t. In the second debate, Gore was bland, passionless, but still a bit ill at ease. Bush looked relaxed.
Another misunderstood factor in debates is expectations. Most voters don’t have a strong sense of the candidate before they watch a debate. For them, the campaign has been background noise. For the media, however, expectations are paramount. This explains why most journalists thought Bush won the second debate. The press stereotype of Bush is that he’s charming but doesn’t know much, particularly about foreign affairs. So when he talked fluently about foreign issues for 45 minutes, he exceeded their expectations. My guess is most voters were less impressed, merely taking the Bush chatter about East Timor, the IMF, and the Middle East at face value.
For all the hype, debates are sometimes less significant than we think. Reagan lost both debates to Walter Mondale in 1984 and won the election by 18 points. In the first, he tried to be a detail man and flopped. In the second, he was cut off in the middle of his incoherent tale about driving down the Pacific Coast Highway. In 1988, 1992, and 1996, debates had minimal impact. But this year, with non-incumbent candidates whose style and manner weren’t well known to voters, the debates could be decisive. Should Gore win after losing the first two debates, we’ll know they were not. If Bush becomes president, though, his performance in the debates will have made it happen.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
