DURING the 1992 presidential debate between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, the senior Bush was so eager for it to be over that he kept looking at his watch.
It was all captured on camera, author Paul Slansky notes in his book Idiots, Hypocrites, Demagogues, and More Idiots – Not-So-Great Moments in Modern American Politics.
Presidential debates provide Americans, in fact, the world, a close-up view of the candidates battling for the White House.
A slip-up here or a boo-boo there can dent the candidate's campaign. Inane remarks and clueless replies will be revisited again and again by stand-up comedians, bloggers and the press.
Slansky pointed out how George W. Bush stated the obvious prior to his debate with Al Gore in 2000 by saying: “I view this as a chance for people to get an impression of me on a stage debating my opponent.”
The first presidential debate for the 2008 general election will take place next month at the University of Mississippi.
Barack Obama will spar, again, with John McCain on Oct 7; their third and final duel takes place two weeks later.
The debates are organised by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), a non-profit and non-partisan Washington-based corporation that was established in 1987.
“We’ve done all of the presidential and vice-presidential debates since then,” said executive director Janet H. Brown.
Preparation for the 2008 debates began way back in December 2006, she said, “so there’s about 20 months worth of work that has gone into the plan”.
It is, after all, a huge, live TV production where mishaps must be prevented, although sometimes they are unavoidable.
For instance, a power failure interrupted the debate between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976. The sound went dead and “Mr Ford and Mr Carter stood on the stage in silence for 27 minutes”, she recalled.
Other planning entail picking the sites, the dates and the debate format. This year, more time will be given to questions.
The moderator will pose a question and after a candidate replies the moderator will pursue the topic in conversational style with the candidates.
“I think this will help viewers and listeners understand in greater depth the candidates’ positions on important topics,” Brown told a briefing at the Foreign Press Centre.
Moderators picked for the different events are PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer, NBC special correspondent Tom Brokaw and CBS news veteran Bob Schieffer.
Brown listed three criteria for the selection – their extensive understanding of the candidates, the campaign and election issues; their long experience with live, hard news on TV; and their understanding that their job is to facilitate the conversation and to focus on the candidates.
That, basically, ruled out prominent news anchors for the job.
“The reason that we have had an informal policy against them is that they are news celebrities, if you will. In the past, the public has felt as though it was almost like having another famous personality on the stage,” she said.
For the first time, the CPD will also collaborate with MySpace through a new website, MyDebates.org, to engage a wider audience and to have online discussions on the debates.
According to Brown, at least 160 people would file with the Federal Election Commission as candidates for president of the United States in any given year.
Most of these people would want to be included in the debates to gain visibility.
“But when you have election campaigns that go on as long as they do in this country, by the time you get to the last eight weeks of the campaign, which is when our debates take place, the public wants to see a very small group of individuals from whom the next president is going to be chosen,” she said.
How influential or important are these debates to the voting public?
“For several cycles now, exit polls have shown that more people use the debates as an important factor in making their voting decisions than any other single factor,” she said.
This does not mean that the debates will necessarily change the people’s mind about a candidate.
But the surveys, conducted by TV networks, showed that “people rate them as the single most important factor in how they decide to cast their votes”.
Take the 1988 debate when Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was asked by the moderator whether he would favour the death penalty for the killer if his wife were raped and murdered.
Instead of expressing outrage for conjuring up such a tragic scenario, Dukakis responded without emotion, saying that there was no evidence that capital punishment was a deterrent.
“And with that, any chance of a Dukakis presidency was crushed like a bug,” Slansky said.
