The 1996 presidential debates - 4 October 1996

Whatever happens a month from next Tuesday, which is the day of the presidential election, this Sunday, the 6th October, could go down in the books as a date to remember. It is – for you some of you was – the night of the first presidential debate between President Clinton and Mr Dole, and it could decide the election.

The Democrats are careful in all their press and media trailer advertisements to stress the president versus Mr Dole. After all it was Bob Dole himself who chose to retire from his long-held senate seat and revert to simple Mr. And there's no way for a presidential opponent to counter the incumbent's stress on his title. Whatever the rights and wrongs of a president's tenure – how well or ill he's performed – he is the only president the country has. He is at once head of state as well as head of government and incumbency carries its own portable halo. One of the techniques which an incumbent president uses in the year he's running for re-election is, as the saying goes, to "act presidential".

Franklin Roosevelt was the master at this and his practicing of it did much to help Churchill save England. In 1940, Britain stood alone against a Hitler who had conquered all of Europe. Churchill was begging every other day in secret correspondence with the president for arms and planes and destroyers, and to many of the British at the time, it seemed that Roosevelt was hard hearted. What they forgot, or never remembered, was that war, and declarations of war, and laws that might move the country towards war lie constitutionally in the hands of the Congress, and the Congress then was dominated by isolationists – a whole party accusing Roosevelt of intending to save Britain with American blood.

Roosevelt's opponent in that dreadful year was an amiable shaggy bear of a man, a Wall Street utilities expert, who, to be truthful, was all for helping the British too. But when he saw the way things were going, the way every move Roosevelt took to sidestep America's Neutrality Act, was interpreted as yet another sinister move to get America once again onto the battlefields of Europe. Mr Wendell Willkie adopted the popular Republican line and went up and down the country swearing that if Roosevelt was elected for a third term – an audacity never attempted before – the country would be at war by the spring of 1941.

President Roosevelt's advisers were alarmed, quite late in the campaign, that the president would not go barnstorming, lashing out at Mr Willkie. The president conveyed in public statements and in occasional White House radio fireside chat that the state of the world and Hitler's mastery of Europe made ordinary campaigning, hopping around the country, unworthy of a president at such a time. He never even mentioned the name of Willkie.

Everywhere he spoke – and he spoke gravely at an airbase, a gun factory, a college – he ignored domestic troubles and swore that America's urgent need was to build up arms for its own defence. He also swore over and over again, well knowing it was a very tenuous promise, that no American boy was going to be sent into any foreign war.

He succeeded in alarming the country at the unreadiness of its own defences, and, to satisfy the large number of Americans who wanted to give all possible material aid to Britain in spite of the existing laws, Roosevelt pledged that in his coming third term he would make America the "arsenal of democracy." It was a memorable phrase, perhaps fateful. It persuaded Hitler to turn on the Soviet Union and try for a quick defeat.

Well Roosevelt won handsomely and a year later he could legitimately claim that he'd kept his promise to send no American boys into any foreign war, since the Japanese obliged by bombing the main Pacific base of the American fleet, and thus converted all ongoing wars in Europe, Asia, Africa, wherever to America's wars.

It's been noticeable this late summer and early fall that Mr President Clinton cannot claim that the free world is in crisis, and most of the national issues that are in dispute are domestic: the reform of welfare, more taxes or less, healthcare, the poor, crime and drugs.

So the president has been out on the road tirelessly campaigning all around the country. He's a dab hand at embracing people in small, homely places, and he's been revelling in it. But he knows as well as any previous president about the subliminal presence of that presidential halo and he's made a point of giving brave, non-campaigning speeches at a naval academy, at a university, at the bases where troops were off to Bosnia, at a military funeral, bringing Israel's and Palestine's leaders to the White House. And at such he stands at a lectern, always prominently graced with the presidential seal of office. At such times, no question, we tend to forget the good old boy from Arkansas and we see a young but dignified figure, a responsible young statesman being presidential.

I remember when we newsmen and women were on the road covering Kennedy in 1960 and quite a few of the reporters called him Jack: But Jack, what would you do if Congress...and so on. And one veteran reporter shook his head and said to me: "You can't ever imagine this boy acting presidential can you?"

When Kennedy won, the day he held his press conference and walked to the lectern in the White House. All the press, the media people stood up instinctively and my doubting Thomas friend was the first to ask a question, "But Mr President..." Once you're there it becomes automatic to see that human as the president even when, as a human, he looks like Calvin Coolidge who, said President Theodore Roosevelt's daughter, looked as if he'd been "weaned on a pickle." Even if the president was rotund and jowly, like Coolidge's successor, Herbert Hoover, whom H.L. Mencken called "a fat Coolidge".

So on Sunday, the president started with the advantage over Mr Dole of being president, and as much as the obvious perquisites of his office, patronage in every state of the union, the visual sense that this man is it, the boss, el presidente is what makes an incumbent difficult to unseat.

The institution of public debates between two opposing American statesmen is old. It started famously so long ago as 1858 when a rough lawyer from Illinois debated one Stephen Douglas in a campaign for a United States Senate seat. The rough lawyer lost that time, but two years later ran for president, running on an anti-slavery platform, and he became the first Republican president: Abraham Lincoln.

However, the idea of open debates between the top presidential candidates is fairly new. Television bred the idea in 1960, and it was one that neither candidate could refuse for two-hour debates were set, and the record and the historians all now agree that the first television debate between vice president Nixon and Senator John Kennedy was probably decisive for a very simple, stark, visual reason: the strikingly different way the candidates looked on camera.

I doubt that in any gathering of old Americans today, people who watch the debate, I don't suppose one in a score could tell you that the substance, the main theme of the debate was – wait for it – the defence of Quemoy and Matsu, two tiny islands seven thousand miles away off the mainland of China, which Washington decided was vital to America's security to defend. They've not been mentioned since 1960.

But even youngsters who never saw the debate, but have seen videotapes of it are still startled by the contrast between Kennedy, looking like something between a choirboy and young god – the black and white image disguised his rather yellow complexion, which was the symptom of a disease he denied – and what the television camera did to Mr Nixon, who had refused all make-up but a light dusting of powder, which succeeded in heightening his generally ashen look. He looked haggard, unshaven. Afterwards, the phrase five o'clock shadow was firmly attached to Mr Nixon.

Am I saying that in this great republic, the voters swung towards Kennedy and away from Nixon because of the way they looked on camera in a studio debate? Yes. It didn't help Mr Nixon, that while the television audience gave the debate to Kennedy, the radio audience – which was much smaller – gave it to Nixon.

Not all presidential candidates since have yielded to the debate ideal. Lyndon Johnson for one spurned it. But Gerald Ford accepted, and in his debate with Jimmy Carter made the fatal error of declaring that Poland was a free country. Ronald Reagan made Jimmy Carter visibly uncomfortable by the frequent use of a single gag line, beautifully timed with a sigh. Mr Carter would make some assertion or cite some statistic – you see? I can't remember what – and it didn't matter what it was, Mr Reagan took it as an example of another Carter failing. So Jimmy Carter would assert or pronounce or quote, and Reagan would say, "There he goes again." It is what we remember best.

I see no sign from the campaigning styles of both the president and Mr Dole that this weekend's debate is any more likely to be decided by the issues they've been talking about on the stump. Mr Dole decided a month or two ago that his idea of a 15 per cent tax cut would be the tastiest bait he could offer the voters. Strangely a majority of the voters are suspicious of it. Whereas in Reagan's day, the promise to cut personal income taxes drastically was manna from heaven, this time the simplest people say: But to make up for it, isn't he going to have to make ruinous spending cuts for the poor, for children, for education, for health? President Clinton publicly suggests so.

Whoever turns out to have been the most persuasive debater and on what topic, it's worth remembering in the light of experience that most viewers tend to judge character and presidential competence by the way they look and act. "Body language," one old timer said, "is the key." Or as Mr Nixon only a year or two ago said delicately about television debates: "Appearance makes a hell of a difference".

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