When Both Sides Punted a Lot

By Thomas Griffith

Now that the absorbing but unsatisfying televised debates are all over, it can be seen that they took on an undue burden because there was so little else in the campaign on which to make a judgment. Perhaps this accounts for how little sympathy the press and the public gave to the nervous participants. Even the setting made the candidates look like men in the dock, or like those carnival games in which you throw baseballs at a head sticking out of a hole.

As part of television's great fall season of sports and entertainment, the debates were also a kind of World Series. If so, compare the correct professionalism of the news correspondents in the debates with those sports commentators who whomp up any event, regale you with anecdotes and pay maudlin visits to the victors' dressing-room celebrations to fawn on the owners. In this chilled televised courtroom, the reporters were the prosecutors. Throughout the debates, a vital distance between news coverage and promotion was still kept.

This was as it should be: however much sports metaphors dominate our speech, the debates were more than a game. The added edge to reporters' questions came from a frustrated feeling that here at last the candidates should be pinned down. As John Chancellor said in a recent speech, "I don't think I've ever seen a pettier campaign, an emptier campaign, a campaign so lacking in a discussion of real issues." Even in the debates, the candidates had narrowed the range of things they intended to say no matter how a question was put; they were, until the last and best debate, often demeaningly petty; they felt free to parrot lines they had used many times before, and as a substitute for argument they regurgitated mouthfuls of numbers that were a feat of memory in an absence of thought. Nonetheless the candidates had to respond to questions they would have preferred to avoid.

The questions were often better than the answers, though as the old saying goes, a fool can ask ten questions while a wise man is answering one. Generally, print journalists knew their subjects better than electronic journalists; the best-balanced team of questioners were the three who queried the vice-presidential candidates; the best single questioner was Max Frankel, who exhibited the sharpness he will bring to the New York Times editorial page when he becomes its editor in January. His question to Ford produced the famous gaffe on Eastern Europe, which Frankel, unbelieving, gave Ford a chance to correct. An equally pertinent Frankel question to Carter went unanswered as Carter unabashedly took off on his own prepared denunciation of Administration foreign policy. In this, Carter's tactic was reminiscent of the way General Charles de Gaulle, brushing aside a flurry of specific, needling press questions, would begin loftily: "I have been asked about Algeria." In a thousand living rooms, people might say, "Carter's not answering the question," but Carter was willing to take that chance (as was Ford) to score a point. For these were not true debates, nor true press conferences (they were closer to an extended Meet the Press).

The rules can be improved, if there is a next time, as there should be. Among those unhappy about the format of the debates were the networks, who usually bring you their own superstar versions of all political occasions, concentrating as much on themselves as on the politicians. They were frozen out this time, confined to tacked-on programs of later commentary. These were pretty lame, epitomized by Eric Sevareid, furrowed brows and all, concluding glumly that it was all old stuff. In the final debate, Bill Moyers got it better: both sides, he suggested, punted a lot. On public television, Sander Vanocur called the debates "an unnatural act between two consenting candidates in public." The effort to maintain neutrality on the air apparently permitted a jaded response to the whole event, but not a comparative judgment of the two candidates' performances. Having been told they had been watching a contest, people naturally wanted to hear who won; their favorite commentators were not about to say. Obviously these men would have no trouble telling their wives an hour later, but professionalism or prudence guided them now.

Saying which candidate you think won the debate isn't the same thing as saying you favor him for President. Mostly, commentators evaded the question uppermost in viewers' minds and went on discussing how evasive the candidates had been.

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