The Great Equalizer

Ever since President Dwight Eisenhower used TV to advertise his 1952 campaign, political purists have fretted that it might be possible to market a national leader on image alone--that voters would respond to the sizzle and forget to ask, Where's the steak? Presidential candidates spend up to $16 million on broadcast messages, and media strategists often become their most powerful advisers. The conventional wisdom is that a candidate's ads set the tone and direction for his campaign. But conventional wisdom in American politics has a way of being debunked, and this year the prideful place of paid ads is being taken by an older and far less expensive form of political communication, the debate.

The most dramatic example came in New York's primary, where Gary Hart spent $800,000 on TV and radio ads, yet finished far behind Walter Mondale (who spent about $350,000) and barely ahead of Jesse Jackson (who spent nothing). Some critics judged in retrospect that Hart's burning-fuse commercial was not only unbelievable in its implication that Mondale is warlike but also "out of synch" with Hart's efforts to put himself forward as a visionary leader. Said Consultant David Sawyer, who advised John Glenn: "Hart's TV spots did not reinforce the basic issues of his campaign." Moreover, to some reporters and perhaps to voters, the attacking Hart of TV ads was not the same personality as the frequently defensive and sometimes conciliatory figure he seemed in the New York debate. Mondale was more consistently on the attack, both in ads and as he presented himself for news stories, winch cost nothing. But David Garth, his New York media strategist, contended that commercials rarely have much impact in a presidential primary anyway, because they have only days to get a message across.

Nearly all the analysts agreed on one broad point: debates have proved the great equalizer, allowing underfinanced candidates to compete on even terms. Said New York Congressman Charles Schumer, who helped organize the year's first televised Democratic round table, at January's Dartmouth College free-for-all: "The debates have become the crucible we hoped for." Key themes of the campaign have emerged from the six subsequent national TV debates--two more on PBS, plus two on Cable News Network, one on the C-Span cable network, and the one in New York on CBS. Apart from their direct impact on viewers, debates are excerpted on TV news and help set the agenda for the press. When Hart asked Mondale in an Iowa debate to cite one issue on winch he had differed with labor, Mondale ducked the question; for days afterward, journalists kept posing the same query, fostering the impression Hart had sought to make, that Mondale is overly beholden to his supporters. In Atlanta, Mondale turned to Hart and cracked, "When I hear your new ideas, I'm reminded of that ad 'Where's the beef?' " That skewering sentence became perhaps the most excerpted "sound bite" from the 60-minute debate and served as effectively as any commercial to convey Mondale's message that Hart lacks substance.

Jackson, who played the peacemaker in the New York debate and was judged by some commentators to have "won," may have achieved his victory the moment he sat down: just by appearing on an equal basis with Hart and Mondale, he was able to convey to his chief constituency, black voters, that casting a ballot for him was not an irrelevant act. Mondale and Hart, who squabbled almost nonstop in New York--not least about each other's accusatory TV ads--apparently took their cue from Jackson's success. In last Thursday's debate in Pittsburgh, there was barely a murmur of discord.