Presidential candidates' TV debates

A couple of weeks ago I exercised great restraint in not talking about what we're calling 'the great debates', the television debates between President Ford and Mr Carter, partly because it was too soon to know how most people felt about them. Mainly because I feared that my own feeling would not be shared by a majority of the watching audience – which was figured, by the way, at something like a hundred millions or almost one half of the population of the United States.

Well, it turned out that most Americans did seem to feel that the first debate was a performance of almost stupefying dullness and I think it's important to say that this is not a reflection on the characters of the two men, but on the way in which they had been set up and briefed and disciplined for television. When radio broadcasting first came in, I remember Bernard Shaw saying that at last it would be impossible for public men to disguise their true character because the human voice, heard in limbo, is the most accurate barometer of character. 

And we might well think that the television close-up, plus the human voice, would offer an almost terrifying X-ray of any human personality. So it can, when the human doesn't know he's being seen, which is why I find television is at its most fascinating when it's recording something happening now, but the people are unaware of the record or the recorder. 

Well, when the television debates were first agreed on, the advisers of President Ford and of Mr Carter went into a huddle to decide on the form they should take or what we now call the 'format.' I ought to say at the start that the debates were not sponsored by the networks or the government, but by a high-minded organisation called the League of Women Voters. 

They are a very responsible body who have chapters in every state. They are non partisan. They screen every candidate for public office and publish as impartial a summary as possible of the man's or the woman's fitness for public office. 

Well, it was a good thing that they offered at the start to sponsor the debates. As it was, there was a tiresome, preliminary hassle between the networks and the candidates' managers about how many reporters should be on hand to put the questions, how big an audience, how many minutes for statements, how many for rebuttal and so on. 

One network threatened to walk out on the whole show if the League of Women Voters insisted on their point that there should be no camera shots of the audience reaction. Happily the league stood by its guns because I should think everybody knows that nothing can not so much convey, as contrive an emotional response to something being said than a shot of two placid women, one yawning man or anybody in animated conversation with a neighbour. The league won its point and all the networks reluctantly agreed to the form – the candidates to toss a coin for the first little speech, so many minutes for rebuttal, so many questions from each reporter. 

All right. Now it was all set. And when the curtain, so to speak, went up on the first broadcast, we all expected, if not a ding-dong battle – which if it had been Harry Truman and Tom Dewey we should certainly have had – but at least a free and spontaneous exchange of ideas and arguments. We had forgotten the image makers, the PR men, the advertising firms and the corps of political advisers who got together long before the first debate to decide ahead of time what sort of impression their man should make. In the old days, Franklin Roosevelt needed no advertising agency to construct his image and no voice coach to tell him when to thunder and when to croon. 

But since about the 1950s, when a couple of California advertising men started what they claimed was a scientific survey of what voters wanted, what they wanted their leaders to look like and sound like and be – Mr Nixon, by the way, was a very early client of these two who shall mercifully remain anonymous – since then, political candidates with few exceptions have given in to the assurance of public relations men that it is fatal to be what you seem. You must be groomed and coached and barbered and edited as a new human creation. These fabricators take the human being as the raw material of their creation and somehow they've managed to convince enough politicians that God knew very little about the sort of human voters would vote for. 

This process can involve, too, pinning a candidate in a room, assembling his advisers and experts on various specialties – foreign affairs, inflation, oil, social welfare and the rest – and firing test questions at the candidate in what amounts to a rehearsal of the great debate. Jimmy Carter got in one or two experts and made his own notes but he did not, I believe, subject himself to the gruelling rehearsals for many hours on end that President Ford went through. 

Well, the result of all this we saw in the Philadelphia debate. Everything about both men had been tailored from their new suits down to their opinions. They stood up there like two cardboard figures of the sort they have at amusement parks. It used to be Hitler and Mussolini moving round on a circular disc for amateur gunmen to take a shot at. Both of them were prepared and pasteurised and programmed, frankly, out of all humanity. Why? How did this preposterous new process come about? 

It all goes back to the first public debates in our time between two presidential candidates, the now-famous Kennedy versus Nixon arguments and it's now part of American folklore that Kennedy won, if only by a hair's breadth in 1960, because in the first debate he looked like an adorable choirboy. A very well informed one, by the way. And Nixon looked like Boris Karloff. 

The advisers of our present candidates have ransacked the records of that debate. They notice that whereas Kennedy wore no make-up – he didn't need to, he'd worked up a fine suntan beforehand – Nixon had a make-up that gave him, by contrast, a plastic look and even so, drops of sweat began to gather on his upper lip, which happens to human beings. Many other tiny details like these were memorised as cautionary tales to be remembered if we ever had another televised presidential debate. 

So before Mr Ford and Mr Carter walked on to the stage at Philadelphia, they'd been at the mercy of cosmeticians and public relations men and their own advisers. Spontaneous humanity was evidently considered a very dangerous property to expose in such a serious encounter and we saw none of it, but two straw men, very uncomfortable, more afraid of a slip than anxious to show conviction or humour or anger or anything else that might make the voters rise and say, 'There is a man!' Consequently there was no discoverable contest and no wonder the subsequent polls of public opinion showed it to be a bewildering draw. Democrats felt that Carter had out-argued Ford by a few decimal points, Republicans felt Ford had out-pointed Carter, which is where they all came in. 

Last Wednesday night we had the second debate, this time from San Francisco and it was on foreign affairs. It was, no question, livelier than the first one if only because the two, that both, of them grew bolder about throwing at each other piles of unanswerable statistics. And by unanswerable, I don't mean the statistics clenched any argument or were the last word on any subject. Each man had his own set of statistics memorised to a fare-thee-well and he quoted them irrespective of the other fellow's statistics. So what we had was a recital of figures with what the logic experts call 'false reference'. For instance, the other night Mr Carter said there are more unemployed today than there were when Mr Ford came into office. That's true. Mr Ford countered by saying that the low unemployment the Democrats always boast about is due to the fact that when the Democrats are in the White house, the United States is always in a war. And that's true. 

Suppose Mr Ford had said there may be more unemployed now than there were two years ago, but there are also more people employed than ever before in history. Both statements are true. Nobody related these two facts which on the surface sound contradictory. It takes only a moment's thought to realise that since the population is growing all the time and therefore the workforce is increasing, what matters is what percentage of the population is out of work. It's the kind of thoughtful moment that was never in evidence in either debate. 

Mr Ford says Mr Carter wants to reduce the defence budget by between five and seven billion dollars, and that is so. But Mr Carter doesn't or didn't say how he would invest the lower defence budget more cagily, more wisely – he having been himself a nuclear engineer – he got that in though. He came back and said that Mr Ford had been, too, for a lower defence budget till the polls showed him slipping and then he put a couple of billions back, and then before he got the Republican nomination, he was all for economy in defence, but once he was nominated he put back some more billions at the urging of the Pentagon. 

I'm sure this is all true but the effect of this sort of thing on an audience is much the same as it would have been if we'd had each man making a speech in a soundproof glass case, not hearing any of the other man's speech. So, as a true debate, as a rational exchange between responsible men countering each other's arguments, discovering their true differences, it, too, was a flop. And yet, I don't think there's any doubt that the debates will have an influence on the election, in spite of the wizardry of the public relations men, but because of Bernard Shaw's simple discovery. 

What people argue about now is not the irrelevancy of the defence or employment statistics, but the way Mr Ford's eyes seemed to grow closer together as he gets miffed, the way Mr Carter licks his lips and smiles at Ford's statistics. It comes down to people reacting, maybe over-reacting, but to the few glimpses of humanity in a puppet show. 

And the morning after the debate, something came out in the papers that could make the TV debates more useless still. The economy is showing increasing signs of trouble. The stock exchange is starting to plummet. Once this was out, the polls showed Mr Ford losing the gains he'd been making. After all the loving care expended on making the two candidates look and sound like two faceless computers, what may move the voters decisively is the sight of the stock exchange ticker going down.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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