Electoral debates past and present - 9 October 1992

I have manfully kept my, oh dear – I was told by a very sincere young lady that I must never use that word "manfully". Not because it's old-fashioned but because it's macho. Male chauvinist, piggy. Sorry. I have faithfully kept my promise to talk as little as possible about the presidential election until we got into the home stretch. We are now in the home stretch. The election is three weeks on Tuesday and it's in the first of those weeks, beginning this Sunday, that we're going to get our fill of the campaigning. There are to be, within eight days and nights, four debates between the principals – three presidential with Mr Bush, Mr Clinton and Mr Perot up there, one vice-presidential debate with vice-president Quayle and Senator Gore going at each other.

Let me say something about the idea of debates and what each party has to hope and fear from them. It's quite a new idea and was provoked, as many other things in public life are, by the arrival of television. In 1960, somebody recalled the most famous debates in American history, way back there in 1858, when a candidate for the United States Senate, one Abraham Lincoln, challenged his opponent, an incumbent, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. They had debated together twice, when Senator Douglas proposed seven more jousts in various cities around the state. Now to jog around Illinois, jog is quite the wrong word. Travel was pretty slow in those days and Illinois is about the size of Scotland and the whole of Ireland combined. It would take three months to wind up the debates.

They agreed on a format: opening speech each one hour, each have an hour and a half to reply, rebuttal by the first speaker, half an hour. So each time, before audiences of on average 10,000, there would be five and a half hours of speechifying. In those days, why I don't know, all speeches, same in the House of Commons, went on and on and on. Five years later, on the battlefield of Gettysburg, the principal speaker, a famous Yankee statesman and orator, spoke for just over two hours. President Lincoln followed with a very little noticed address of just over two minutes.

Well, in the election of 1858 for the Senate, remember, Lincoln topped Douglas in the popular vote by about 4,000 in a quarter of a million but he didn't get to the Senate. In those days, can you imagine, United States senators were not chosen by the voters but by the state legislatures. When the Illinois legislature balloted, 54 Democrats voted for Douglas, 46 of the newly-formed Republican party for Lincoln. But the debates, both to the people who heard them and the many more people who read them, made Lincoln a formidable presidential candidate and two years later, in 1860, he was in the White House.

In 1960 we saw the first presidential television debate. There were four debates in all, a chairman or moderator, a panel of reporters put 10 questions and the principals, standing apart, each at a schoolmaster's desk. Times had changed, they were to have opening statements of only eight minutes each and rebuttals of two minutes. Senator John Kennedy on the left of your screen, Vice President Richard Nixon on the right. Ready, set, go. The four debates took a month and were, of course, all in television studios, the first in Chicago. Both sides hoped for an audience of several millions.

In the result, the first debate drew 65 million people. It staggered the politicians, the participants and the people. Some, the Democrats particularly, came to believe that the election was won on that first debate. Not because of anything either man said, by election day I doubt one voter in 10 could have told you what the debated topics were. What remained in the memory were the very sharply different images, literally, of the two. Kennedy, who on the road had often been nervous, touching his tie, splaying his flat hand against the air clumsily, that night he was blissfully confident, young and handsome and people said, boy this young fella has done his homework. By contrast. Nixon was strangely haggard, he'd been ill and in hospital and the following two weeks had run himself ragged on the road. He'd lost five pounds in weight, he had not shaved. He talked at Kennedy, Kennedy talked to the listening millions.

To put it in a vivid, exaggerated form, Kennedy looked like an amazingly well-informed choirboy, Nixon looked like Dracula. Never mind that Kennedy won the election by an eyelash, 110 thousand votes in 60 million and there was undeniable evidence of hanky-panky with the votes in West Virginia and Illinois, the recollection of that first debate is indelible and every Presidential year there's an outcry, not always heard by the incumbent, for more Presidential debates. In two of the most famous subsequent debates, one was lost, by President Ford, because of an incredible blunder. I can still see him proclaiming as a fact we should not forget, that Poland was an independent country, not under the domination of the Soviet Union. Afterwards his aides had to explain that, of course he'd meant to say Poland was under the domination. Another unforgettable debate was Jimmy Carter, President Carter, versus the hopeful Ronald Reagan, won by Reagan's mock sadness at every repeated assertion of President Carter. Reagan would shake his head and sigh and say, there he goes again. Brought the house down.

This time it was Governor Clinton who proposed debates and president Bush for the longest time, and on the advice of his chief of staff, former Secretary of State, Mr Baker, simply ignored the call. Clinton wanted the two men to have simply one moderator, no questioning reporters. It gave Bush the chance to say, terrible format, forget the whole thing. Clinton suggested Mr Bush didn't dare to debate and behold, wherever President Bush appeared at rallies, there was a flock of chickens, Clinton folk, dressed up in chicken feathers. Mr Bush took about 10 days of this and, with the chicken chorus rising in the press, he gave in.

Re-enter, to the pain of almost everybody looking on, Mr Ross Perot. He's on the ballot in all 30 states and is therefore, whether he had declared or not, a Presidential candidate. He knows he can't possibly win and swears he didn't come back as a spoiler, but that's what he can't help being. By having his name up there, he tempts disgruntled or wobbly people to click the lever against his name and so take the votes away from either Governor Clinton or President Bush, in this state or that. The arithmetic of all the possible defections, which state Perot hurts Clinton, which state Bush, is already an occult specialty we won't go into now.

You'll notice I haven't talked abut the one subject on which all well-informed people are supposed to decide their vote, the issues. I've hinted that character or the perception of character may matter more and every day either the President or Governor Clinton thinks up a new charge about the other, a new wrinkle of doubt and Mr Bush especially is often so busy scorning Governor Clinton's plans that he forgets to tell us his own because, the Clinton people say, he hasn't any. I must say, so far the campaign has been conducted on both sides with a painfully high muzzle velocity of schoolboy taunting. But the one issue that all parties and all polls agree on has been paramount, is going to be the deciding issue, is the parlous state of the economy which is flowering at the rate of a century plant, a sluggishness not matched since the Second World War.

And plainly President Bush, being the incumbent, is the one who gets the blame. Americans are ruthless about this. If a football team loses five games in a row, few people say, we ought to have a better linebacker or a better defence or so and so's woefully off form, the cry goes up, fire the coach. Governor Clinton is at present the beneficiary of this tradition and all the polls put him somewhere between 8 and 12 points ahead, which is very handsome, but oddly the Clinton people are more than a little scared. What they fear most, as I talk, is what has been dubbed an October surprise. Some horrendous charge dragged up by the Bush people that cannot be denied and that would ditch Governor Clinton. This may be only a nasty death wish on the part of the media, who throve most lustily on scandal. So far it hasn't happened and what everybody's saying now is, the debates will settle it. Most of the serious press and the pollsters and pundits are refining this hunch to say that the debates will offer the president his last chance to pull even, that they will make or break him.

What has been called the Second Coming of Mr Perot offers many irritations for the other two candidates. He could trivialise the debates or defuse them like a bad referee in a fencing match, who constantly intrudes his own foil and keeps calling foul. It's an amazing thing that he's in there at all. The last substantial third party independent candidate didn't appear with Reagan and Carter. Both camps, on second thoughts believe they blundered in letting Perot in but, on third thought, they recoiled before the likeliest consequence, Perot beating his breast and claiming that democracy had been flouted, fairness traduced, all those millions out there who yearn for him denied access.

If there is one good thing about Mr Perot's intervention, it is that the nub of his message, the big plank in his platform is the deficit. The other two mention it in passing and, frankly, the economic plans of both of them anticipate increasing the deficit till the economy shows signs of health. Perot may make them face the nasty elementary fact that, as in Mr Micawber's picture of a bankrupt, we spend much more than we earn. The most surprising truth brought up about him is that over 80% of his own disciples, his former worshippers, wish he hadn't come back and only one in 10 is sure of staying with him. We shall see, By this time next week, all, as Churchill used to say, will be made plain. Or not.

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