Tuesday night, presidential candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush battled it out in the first of three presidential debates. The American Prospect asked the experts to answer the question:
"Who won the debate?"
Debra Dickerson
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Wendy Kaminer
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Joshua Micah Marshall
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Micah Sifry
Debra Dickerson:
It should be obvious to even the most committed Dubya fans that their hero is a fraud. He is, in fact, afaker and lazy slob. What he is not, is dumb, the one thing we thought we knew about the man. Givenhis, for him, masterful performance in the first presidential debate, it is abundantly clear that the BushDauphin hasn't hardly even been trying until now. Where were all the mangled phrases? I noted nary aone. The malapropisms? Absent. The utter gobbledygook he's been spewing like Linda Blair-brandpea soup before tonight? It's as if it never was. The man was downright coherent and thoroughlyknowledgeable. Which says to this observer that he could have been making sense all along. He justcouldn't be bothered with boring stuff like proper pronunciation, complete sentences, or a nativespeaker's phraseology. What kind of example is that? Won't someone please think of the children?
Bush was articulate, well informed, and redundant as hell (in our sleep, Americans will be chanting,zombie-like, "You've had eight years to pass fill-in-the-blank legislation and you haven't done it. Weneed new leadership"). He made Americans sit still and listen to him. Even so, I clocked it at only ahalf hour into the debate before the governor started squirming and the smirking chicken look tookroost on his face. It makes him look like his father -- wimpy and peevish. It is the look of a pampered,but well-mannered kid denied a bauble for the very first time. He accepts it, but he's not happy aboutit. That is not a face used to uncertain outcomes or waiting for what it wants. His handlers should forcehim to watch himself in the mirror while tapes of Gore speeches play so he can learn to control thatsucking lemons, "What stinks in here?" look.
Though he did himself proud, it is a fact that the vice president kept the governor on the defensive forat least the last half of the debate. Quite passively, indeed seeming almost grateful to be allowed tostop speaking, Bush usually gave ground to moderator Jim Lehrer's mild interruptions while the vicepresident rolled inexorably over Lehrer like a steamroller padded with soft money. But Americans don't like bullying, and it may well be that Gore's pugnaciousness will play asnegativism and mud slinging in the local diner. Bush may come off as a "doer," uncomfortable with a lotof palaver, while Gore is just another windbag, loving the sound of his own voice. Also, on mytelevision, Gore looked embalmed and over-made up, like a well-preserved corpse made to appearlifelike with a Frankenstein machine. His collar and tie fit him like sausage casings -- a little too soon, asthey say in the Midwest. He looked overwhelming, as if he would burst from the joy of arguing. Helooked like your cousin the insurance agent who just loves his job and who corners you at every familygathering, annotated actuarial tables in hand. What happened to the earth tones, the almost-leisure suithe wore at the convention? (Both men looked like Robert Palmer back-up boy singers though in theirmatching black suits with red ties. I smell a focus group.)
It remains to be seen whether Americans thought Bush's "no controlling legal authority" jab and overallattempt to connect Gore with Clinton's sins was below the belt and especially whether they thoughtGore's not-entirely-believable high road response won or lost him points. It was a gamble on boththeir parts. Americans may well be sick of scandals, as Bush asserts, but they also demonstrated aweariness with open-ended assaults on the White House, if only in this time of prosperity.
As with the rest of this race, I call a draw. Which, of course, is a victory for Bush, the "lightweight."
Debra Dickerson is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
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Wendy Kaminer:
Even Dan Rather seemed bored, suggesting the debate was "narcoleptic." And it's true that there's not much drama in the details of Social Security, Medicare, or tax cut proposals, but I don't think it was the focus on policy that made the debate so tedious. It was the difficulty of evaluating each candidate's claim to be telling the truth about his or the other guy's proposals. The average voter who hasn't done the numbers, or seen an objective accounting of them, had no way of knowing whether Gore or Bush was practicing "fuzzy math."
But I doubt that people paid close attention to the details anyway. They probably focused on tone, demeanor, and the indicatives of sincerity, asking themselves the question Jim Lehrer asked toward the end of the evening: Why should people trust you in a crisis? How can we expect you to handle the unexpected?
I like to think that by asking the candidates about their improvisational skills, Lehrer was intentionally reminding us that the debate itself was no Evening at the Improv. Their performances were entirely scripted (which is partly why they were so dull). Both Gore and Bush had memorized a series of set pieces that they were trained to deliver, regardless of their unresponsiveness. Lehrer asked the questions he wanted to ask; they answered the questions they wanted to answer.
Not answering questions is harder than it seems. I've tried to learn the art of being interviewed in the course of several book tours and still find myself instinctively answering the questions that are asked, at least in part. If you allow yourself any spontaneity, it's hard not to engage in a conversation with your interviewer. But, with the possible exception of Bill Clinton (who seems like a master improviser) most candidates fear spontaneity; it's the enemy of predictability and control.
So the first question to Gore about his view of Bush's credentials became an occasion for the vice president to talk about his own policy proposals (he was clearly determined to talk only about himself and avoid attacking Bush). He even used the question about his ability to improvise as an occasion for assuring us that he would stand with the people and not the powerful. (It was toward the end of the evening and he probably remembered that he hadn't yet delivered his populism paragraph.)
Bush was more defensive, trying to appear Reaganesque -- good humored and down to earth -- in dismissing Gore's characterizations of his economic plans. His frequent references to Gore's "fuzzy math" was his way of saying "There you go again." He was, not surprisingly, less coherent and much less fluent than Gore, but he was equally unresponsive, offering the usual simplistic and highly general descriptions of his own policy proposals.
Each candidate, of course, had his themes: Bush repeatedly assured us that he was a relatively non-partisan, Washington outsider who would empower people to make their own choices (except with regard to reproduction). "Power to the people" may seem an odd slogan for a conservative Republican, but it's a clever way for a "compassionate conservative" to let us know that government won't be around to help us when we need it: Instead of telling us that, if he's elected, we're on our own, Bush promises us that we will be able to make our own choices. (Some people choose poverty, Reagan once suggested, when he spoke about the voluntary poor.) Gore is still promising to fight for working families and the middle class.
But putting aside the familiar campaign messages, much of the debate seemed scripted by pundits not on the candidate's payrolls. That is, each seemed to be making an effort to follow the pundits' advice: Gore tried to appear friendly, positive, non-confrontational and more accessible than pedantic. Bush tried to show some command of policy. Listening to a few post-debate wrap-ups, you might think that Bush "won" the debate by not being a blithering idiot. But people seem to overlook stupidity in their presidents anyway. Reagan blithered in one of his encounters with Mondale in '84 but still won re-election easily.
If I watched this debate not knowing anything about either candidate, I'd vote for Gore. (Knowing a lot about both, I'll probably vote for neither.) Still, I'm looking forward to the next debate, hoping that we'll hear some important questions that weren't asked last night -- questions about racism, criminal justice and the war on drugs. ("Why do you think that one out of three African American males are in prison or on probation or parole," I'd like to ask the candidates.) I'd like to hear questions about church state relations, equal rights for lesbians and gays, and free speech. Bush said that Supreme Court justices should hold the Constitution sacred. I'd say the same about presidents.
Wendy Kaminer is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and has been a fellow at Radcliffe College since 1987. Her most recent book is Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety.
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Joshua Micah Marshall:
As someone who is paid to come to definitive opinions about political matters, I must admit to a sizabledegree of uncertainty and consternation over just who won last night's debate. Not because theencounter was inconclusive so much as that there were such different prisms through which one couldview it. Going into this debate, both candidates were flooded with advice from the pundits. Gore wassupposed to tone down the attacks and show his human side. Bush was supposed to brush up on thepolicy issues and not look so callow.
The big news? Neither followed the advice. Gore was articulate and intelligent, fierce and combative.Bush avoided any of the major gaffes I thought he might stumble over (actually I caught one Bushism:During his discussion of abortion, he called for a "cultural life" where he meant to say "a culture of life").But on articulateness and command of the facts, there was simply no comparison: Bush wascompletely out of his league. He had little basic understanding of a number of policy questions, madesome embarrassing statements on foreign policy, and made no real attempt to refute a number of verydamning charges from Gore. In other words, Gore was Gore, and Bush was Bush.
Here's where I come back to the question of which prism voters will choose to apply to the debate.Particularly at the beginning of the debate, Gore came on very strong -- even a bit too strong for me,and I'm an admirer of the vice president. If charm is what voters were looking for, then Gore may havedamaged himself. On the other hand, in the process of seeming uncharming, Gore really embarrassedBush.
One question the debate left me with was just what strategic plan the Gore folks had. Unless hecompletely winged it (which seems very unlikely), the Gore folks clearly weren't impressed with theadvice that Gore had to be less aggressive. If anything, he was a good deal more aggressive than hewas in the Gore-Bradley debates. In the first series of exchanges, Gore seemed to have made theconscious decision not only to press Bush on the issues but to get in his face, to try to rattle him, andmake him lose his cool -- even at the expense of looking bad himself.
Gore seemed to come into the debate with a bit more nervous energy than he should have. And thatshowed through in a sort of frantic affect. But the effort to unsettle Bush was striking, and in a numberof cases successful. This rattling of Bush came out most clearly in a series of very lame jokes he triedto make during the debate -- most notably his line about Gore inventing the calculator. But there wassomething more than poorly executed humor in the "invented the Internet, invented the calculator" line.When Bush was rattled, he not only became less articulate, he also became angry and seemed to fallback on an underlying vein of sullen resentment at the vice president. He didn't attack in a consideredand well-thought-out manner. He lashed out at him when he got knocked back on his heels andneeded something to say.
This came out most clearly toward the end when Bush launched into a sort of simpleton's tirade againstGore's ethics. He managed to string together almost every charge that's ever been hurled at the vicepresident. There were Buddhist temples, "no controlling legal authority," the Lincoln bedroom,everything. (Some of the sentences were simply bizarre: The buck stops in the Lincoln bedroom --huh?) But, again, there was no attempt to weave it together into a compelling critique. It was morerambling and disjointed. He was flailing. And in that, it conveyed not so much command and authorityas desperation and a lack of control. He actually allowed Gore to have one of his best moments: whenthe vice president said simply he would not stoop to personal attacks.
After watching the debate, I read an analysis by the Associated Press' Ron Fournier that said, "Gorewas unusually restrained, having heeded research that suggests some Americans -- particularly swingvoters in competitive states -- are turned off by personal attacks." I hope swing voters saw it that way.But I must confess, I don't know what debate Fournier was watching. Because Gore seemed veryaggressive to me.
In the end, this struck me as a debate in which there was a lot of blood on the floor by the end of 90minutes. And neither candidate came out of it looking that good. But on balance, Gore was able to hitBush with clarity and power on a series of key public policy issues where the public favors Democratsover Republicans: taxes, a drug benefit under Medicare, etc. And even if Gore sometimes came on abit too strong, that basic clarity on issues likely makes it a Gore win.
Joshua Micah Marshall is the Washington Editor of The American Prospect.
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Micah L. Sifry:
The biggest winners of the first "debate" were Ernst & Young International, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs,BellSouth, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and all the other multinational and financial colossi who haveinvested heavily in the campaigns of both Al Gore and George Bush, not to mention the corporatesponsors of the "debate," Anheuser-Busch, AT&T, US Airways and 3Com. Oh yes, let's not forgetcorporate outlaw Archer Daniels Midland, which has subsidized moderator Jim Lehrer's Snooze Hourfor so many years.
Our corporate overlords collectively got what they paid for, "the hoodwinking of the American public"that the League of Women Voters warned us about when they withdrew their support for theCommission on Presidential Debates back in October of 1988. At no point during the "joint televisionappearance" that these things are more properly termed, did anything get said that seriously challengedthe prerogatives of corporate power in America. Oh yes, Gore did press Bush hard on how his tax cutis tilted to the wealthiest 1 percent -- a winning argument in our artificially constrained politicaldiscourse. But there was no one there willing to point out how one third of the tax cut in the 1997budget agreement signed by President Clinton went to the wealthiest 1 percent as well. (See "Tax Plan Violates President's 'Principles'," Citizens for Tax Justice release, July 31, 1997, if you don't believe me.)
Nor was there any debate among the two candidates on another issue of tremendous importance --whether the government should intervene to prop up the stock market or a failing firm on Wall Street.Both men genuflected to Alan Greenspan. Are some banks too big to fail? Does anyone think that itmight not be a good idea to let banks, insurance companies and financial firms merge into mega-banks,with the power to pry deep into their customers' personal lives? Should taxpayers have bailed outinvestors in Mexico's corrupt economy? Gore bragged about his role in the latter adventure, while theaddled Bush burbled about Vicente Fox, "a man I know from Mexico."
The candidate who would have raised such important and inconvenient questions, Ralph Nader, wasphysically barred by the Commission and three uniformed police officers from even sitting in theaudience, though he presented a valid ticket to the event. More than 60 percent of the public thinksthat Nader should be included in the debates, according to the Zobgy poll. But their votes don't reallymatter. I know. I know. I should shut up about how big money and the corporate-sponsoredCommission and the bigfoots of the press all produce a sham of a real debate, and tell you who I think"won" in conventional terms. (But don't you think it's disgusting that ABC News' Peter Jenningsturned to George Stephanopoulos and said, "now that you're a journalist" -- as if the tousled one hasever really reported on anything? And Jennings didn't even mention once Stephanopoulos's ownproud and self-admitted role in keeping Ross Perot out of the debates in 1996 and turning them into "anon-event" -- his words.)
My view -- it was a draw. If you scored on points, Gore was stronger. He clearly dominated thediscussion. But if you scored by the measure that I think all too many Americans subconsciously use inthese depoliticized days -- which man would you like more to watch in the lead role in the four-yearnational sitcom called "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" -- then I think Bush did just fine. And given thatBush has more to lose in these televised auditions -- his tendency to gibber could quickly puncture hisdown-home appeal -- the fact that he made no verbal miscues meant he gained the most last night.
Micah L. Sifry is Public Campaign's senior analyst. The views he offers here are his alone.
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