There He Goes Again - 6 October 2000

In the long ago at just about this interval - a month or so away from a presidential election - I received, in the same week, two letters - begging, mildly despairing notes from two listeners far apart.

The first, from an old lady whom I imagine to be the spitting image of the late Dame May Whitty (remember her as the lady who vanished in The Lady Vanishes?).

She wrote quite simply: "Instead of telling us who might win the presidential election and why, would it not be wiser to wait until the first Tuesday in November and tell us who did win?"

The other letter was more vigorous, more scolding, and I imagined its writer to be a gap-toothed rogue with a guardee's moustache - the late Terry Thomas to the life.

"Oh my dear fellow," he wrote, "don't go on about American politics. One's own politics are bad enough but American politics are a different and perverse form of chess in which the pawns move in any direction they choose, the bishops have too much power and there's no king and queen. Really."

Ever since I've always reminded myself that - contrary to the general American opinion - the other nations of the world are not consumed by a blazing interest in American politics, and yet two trips around the world impressed me with the knowledge that if only because of America's status as the superpower, most nations do have more than a passing interest in who, what sort of man, the next American president will be.

The institution of televised debates between the main candidates is 40 years old. By 1960 television had everywhere outgrown radio as the most popular provider of current news.

And in 1960, for the first time, the people could give flesh and spirit to the well known voices of the two candidates. They were, for the Democrats, John Kennedy and for the Republicans, Richard Nixon.

It's a weird but true reflection on human memory, or perhaps of the first impress of television on politics, that people who saw that debate remember one thing about it as well as they remember where they were when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour or when John Kennedy was assassinated.

The thing that everybody remembers is the physical appearance of the two candidates - the shock of their physical appearance and demeanour.

Nixon, whose rich baritone had sounded, on the radio, like that of an impressive operatic baritone, appeared almost pasty faced, haggard and - help! - unshaven.

Kennedy, whose slightly whining Boston accent had suggested to many people around the country a rather smart-alec college boy, Kennedy appeared bright-eyed, bushy tailed - the image of a very well-informed prodigy.

It was useless to learn later that Mr Nixon had been seriously ill. Much later, an historian of the making of presidents concluded - after dispensing floods of arguments - that he agreed with the popular taxi drivers' view: it was Nixon's five o'clock shadow what done 'im in.

Ever since that first debate there has attached to presidential debates a kind of dumb superstitious magic, that there will be one expression, one sound-bite, one slip, that will turn the tide.

And it's certainly true that President Ford proclaiming the astonishing news that neither Poland nor Czechoslovakia, neither Hungary nor Romania, were under Soviet domination, lost him the 1976 election.

And Ronald Reagan had this cheerful ability to wait and chuckle until President Carter had unleashed a hurricane of statistics and then Mr Reagan would say: "There he goes again."

"There he goes again" is, by now, practically an American idiom.

An odd thought occurred to me the Sunday before Tuesday's debate when a programme came on public television called Forty years of Presidential debates.

The odd thought was this: there are already alive two generations of Americans - voters - who probably assume that public debates between the main presidential candidates are as much of a national tradition as the election itself.

And sure enough a young man of my grandson's age said: "Why 40 years? Didn't they start with Lincoln and Stephen Douglas?" Give the boy an A for accuracy. Quite right.

That was in 1858. It was a debate between two contenders not for the presidency but the senate in the state of Illinois.

Stephen Douglas, the Democrat, who hoped and believed that the Union could survive in harmony between the slave states and the free states.

Lincoln was a country lawyer representing the newly formed party - the Republicans - and he thought not so.

"I believe this government cannot endure half slave and half free but I do expect it will cease to be divided, it will become all one thing or all the other."

Lincoln and Douglas travelled round the state and held seven debates out in the open. The record of them has remained a glowing footnote in American history because they were unique, because they focussed on the great issue that was resolved only by a devastating civil war.

The debates stay green in the memory of anyone who's read them because, as an old historian of the time wrote: "No recorded debate in the English language surpassed those between Lincoln and Douglas for keen give and take, vigorous Saxon language and clear exposition of the vital issue." It's nothing but the truth.

Having recently read the text of two of the debates and then watched and listened to excerpts from the televised debates since 1960 I wondered, first, whatever happened to the English language - which somehow lost its way through the jungles of Latin jargon which politicians and bureaucrats and lawyers love to wade in.

For example, I remember a scene between British and American statesmen and their military aides during the Second World War.

A famous Englishman, just about the last politician to think and speak Anglo Saxon English, said about some foul-up in a battle plan: "The order was given but nothing much was done about it."

Or as our American colleagues might prefer to say: "The directive was mandated but subsequently it was ineffectively implemented."

Today you would not have to make that obvious and odious distinction. Double talk and business babble are just as active in their lumbering way in both countries - in the House of Commons as in the House of Representatives.

Imagine any great political issue today being so perfectly, so shamelessly defined as: "It will become all one thing or all the other."

And yet, I believe, that that is what most voters are looking and listening for - some memorable phrase which does lay bare the nerve, the root, of the complicated arguments between the two candidates. So far we've not heard it.

We were told - nobody gave us the authority for saying so - that 70m people would be watching last Tuesday. This is as high as 80% of the most votes ever cast in a presidential election.

And when you reflect that this country has the worst record of any democratic country in having only half of the qualified voters actually going to the polls you have to ask why, why could so many be eager to see the first of these three projected debates?

Well the first answer is that only 45m watched. It's still a hefty proportion of people who might vote.

Why did they watch when every evening for the past three months they've seen and heard Mr Gore here, Governor Bush there declaiming and explaining and resonating and shouting and putting on, every day, the air of men who are absolutely certain they will be the winner.

The truth is, I think, that this campaigning style - the pitch of voice, the gestures, the pretence of confidence, the fake assurance that they speak for the American people - has become, after 40 years, an act - a stage performance which, for no given reason, every candidate must try to perform.

The great promise of a public debate between the two men was that now we could see them without a script, without a rehearsed response, responding naturally, spontaneously to each other - each man, for once, on his own against the other.

Well it didn't happen because each of them had, for the past few weeks and intensively then last weekend, spent nights and days sitting at a round table of their advisors with one man or two representing the missing opponent.

So an imitation Vice-President Gore or Governor Bush and an imitation moderator putting all the questions the team had figured out the opponent, or the moderator, might put.

So last Tuesday each of the two candidates was so rehearsed, so over-trained, that they didn't have to hesitate to reply to any question, they darted at once into their brisk little lecture on any topic.

The result was that, as we have seen from the campaign speeches, Mr Gore had elaborate statistical answers to everything - the Middle East, abortion, social security, medicare, education, the environment, the date of the coming utopia, you name it - and Governor Bush maintained his affable air of being new to the game but not being put out by his learned opponent.

Every now and then getting off a short simple note of doubt recalling, he hoped, Ronald Reagan's gift for punctuating a difficult problem in mathematics with a touch of common sense. He's not yet Ronald Reagan.

For the moment, though, each man appeared to have convinced his own converted. The vital 10% of voters who are said to be undecided are, it seems, still decided to be undecided.

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