Polite prelude to the debates

In the eyes of his opponents, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry may be a flip-flopping, French-loving liberal, but they can’t heap enough praise on the man’s talents as a debater. The senator from Massachusetts is not merely great, according to President Bush’s top strategist, Matthew Dowd, he is “the best debater since Cicero.”

And while Kerry might see the president as a reckless, self-satisfied cowboy, you can’t believe how highly he thinks of Bush’s rhetorical skills. “He’s won every debate he’s ever had,” Kerry has said repeatedly in the last few weeks. “He beat Ann Richards. He beat Al Gore. People need to understand that.”

As predictable as a cicada mating fest, a mutual admiration society consisting of presidential rivals and their mouthpieces bursts forth ever so briefly once every four years. Candidates who have spent months brutalizing each other suddenly in September can’t be kind enough.

The expectations game is a transparent yet irresistible ploy to create a psychological advantage going into the debates.

On Tuesday, in a conference call with reporters, Bush’s campaign manager Ken Mehlman delivered a backhanded compliment to Kerry. “One can argue,” said Mehlman, “that debating skills are his greatest accomplishment.” But by Thursday, the faux politesse will end as the candidates take off the gloves at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla., for the first of three debates. (The second debate, a “town hall,” is scheduled for Oct. 8 in St. Louis. The third debate will take place Oct. 13 in Tempe, Ariz. The vice presidential candidates will debate Tuesday in Cleveland.)

Their tasks in what might be considered the ultimate job interview are cut out for them. Bush must convince voters that he deserves four more years and that Kerry can’t be trusted to lead the country. Kerry will have to convince them that Bush has bungled the economy and the war in Iraq and does not deserve a second term. Experts say voters are looking for reassurance, empathy and clues about how the candidates, especially the challenger, make decisions.

“They’re looking for somebody they feel comfortable with, somebody who looks as though he can take command of things, make decisions when they have to be made,” said Martin Plissner, the former political director of CBS and author of “Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Elections.” “They want to see what Kerry says he will do if he’s president.”

Although many find the pre-debate dance inane, the conventional wisdom says it must go on. Most people don’t actually watch the debates -- they hear about them or read about them afterward. Thus, “anything that can be done that can affect the spin becomes important,” said James Fallows, who wrote about the debating styles of Bush and Kerry for the July-August issue of the Atlantic. “To the extent that you can low-ball the expectation, it’s like beating the point spread.”

Who ends up “winning” may depend less on who actually “won” than who was perceived as the winner based on expectations. If that makes no sense, welcome to the bizarre world of the presidential debate, where control-freak campaigns battle for weeks over a backdrop’s exact shade of blue (Gerald Ford-Jimmy Carter in 1976); where a shorter candidate might insist on a gently sloping ramp rather than a platform behind the podium so he will not be seen stepping up onto something (Michael S. Dukakis in 1988); and where you will hear a candidate being maligned by his own people. That trend nearly became parody when George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager, James A. Baker III, told journalists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover in 1989 that Bush “basically let us go out and trash his debating ability, but it paid off.”

The last time a candidate’s representative showered unabashed praise on his own man was back in 1976, said Alan Schroeder, a journalism professor at Northeastern University and author of “Presidential Debates: 40 Years of High-Risk TV.” That was Patrick Caddell, who boasted to the New York Times that Carter “is very good with the camera .... He treats it like a person .... It’s his strength.” That, said Schroeder, was “a huge strategic error. And ever since then, you have seen these labored efforts to diminish one’s own debating skill and play up the prowess of the competitor.”

When then-Texas Gov. Bush first debated then-Vice President Gore in 2000, Bush benefited from near-universal low expectations. This time, though, with four years in the White House under his belt, observers say the bar is much higher. “It’s hard for an incumbent to say he doesn’t know the issues,” said Fallows. “So many of Bush’s unscripted comments have been poor that historically the debates have favored him.” This is why, said Fallows, the Bush camp has been singing a familiar refrain: “He is the best leader, but you can’t expect him to succeed against a fancy pants word guy.”

The “fancy pants word guy” is not generally considered to be a scintillating speaker, but Fallows said Kerry “is seen as coming from behind, so that gives him an advantage.” And after watching Kerry’s debates with his 1996 Senate opponent, Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld, Fallows concluded that “under the pressure of a debate, Kerry becomes more natural seeming, and direct and energized.”

Although the campaigns have spent many hours hammering out their 32-page legalistic “memorandum of understanding,” which governs everything from whether candidates may stray from the podium (no) to whether one may ask the other to take a pledge (no), anything can happen on live TV. Once the event begins, the pre-debate Kabuki becomes irrelevant.

“You cannot prescribe in writing how a live TV show will unfold, any more than a prenuptial agreement will tell you how well the marriage is going to work out,” said Schroeder.

“These are naked moments,” said Karlyn Bowman, a polling expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

Who could have predicted that in 1992 the camera would catch an apparently unengaged President George H.W. Bush checking his watch during a debate with Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton? (Bush lost the election.) That in 2000, Gore would be remembered for inappropriately grimacing and sighing during his first debate with Bush? (Gore lost.) That Dukakis would turn off voters in 1988 with his robotic response when Bernard Shaw asked how he’d feel about the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered? (Dukakis lost.) That in 1976, President Ford would insist -- to his regret -- that Soviet-dominated Poland was not under Soviet domination? (Ford lost.) Or that Dan Quayle, against the advice of staff, would compare himself in 1988 to President Kennedy, thereby offering Lloyd Bentsen the priceless opportunity to kneecap him with the now-classic “You’re no Jack Kennedy” retort, which Bentsen had been practicing. (Quayle won, but experts say the vice presidential debate is merely a diversion.)

The elevation of style over substance is the inevitable outcome in a medium as unforgiving as television, which magnifies the seemingly insignificant gesture or the innocent faux pas. Diana Carlin, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas who has conducted post-debate research with viewers for the last three election cycles, was in the audience when Bush checked his watch. “I noticed it,” she said, “but it didn’t make that big an impact on me. The camera intensifies things.”

As a result, small mistakes can seem like major blunders. In the first debate of 2000, Gore, who was criticized by Republicans as a serial exaggerator, talked about a 15-year-old girl at Sarasota High School in Florida who was forced to stand in science class because there weren’t enough chairs. Gore made it sound like an ongoing problem; it had been solved in a day. Gore also mentioned a 79-year-old Iowa woman who had to gather cans to make enough money to pay for her prescription drugs. That woman, Winifred Skinner, he said, was in the audience and had driven in her Winnebago from Iowa to Massachusetts to be there.

“That backfired on him,” said Carlin. “When we got into our focus groups, people were saying, ‘Wait a minute. If she can’t afford her medication, what is she doing driving an RV all the way from Iowa?’ ” Gore violated the rule of “narrative fidelity,” said Carlin. “The stories people tell have to be believable.”

This week, Bush and Kerry have been off the campaign trail in order to prepare intensively for Thursday’s debate, which will focus on foreign policy and homeland security. Clinton prepared avidly for his debates with George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, neither of whom was an enthusiastic debater. Ronald Reagan’s many years of TV experience were a boon to him in debates, allowing him to deliver practiced zingers, according to Schroeder, seemingly off the cuff. (“There you go again” and “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” against Carter in 1980. “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience” against Mondale in 1984.)

The disdain for rehearsal would haunt the independent third-party ticket in 1992. In the vice presidential debate, Ross Perot’s running mate, Adm. James Stockdale, asked the perfectly reasonable questions: “Who am I? Why am I here?” but seemed disoriented and confused by the process. His cause was not helped when he missed a question because he had turned off his hearing aid.

Still, no matter how much each candidate has prepared, live television is full of small moments that no one can predict. As Fallows put it, “We don’t know what we are going to be talking about a week from the first debate.”