Debating the Debates

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Does the present format produce insights or distortions?

Proposition: Debates between presidential candidates are a useful and informative feature of campaigns and should be a quadrennial fixture of American politics. Affirmative case: The debates attract an enormous TV audience, thus stimulating a healthy interest in public affairs. They give voters their only chance to see the candidates side by side and compare them; they offer candidates their sole opportunity to make a sustained pitch to voters committed or leaning to the other side, who would ordinarily shun their rallies and ignore their TV spots.

Negative case: The debates are not really debates at all, but joint press conferences in which the candidates spout the same canned speeches that they give on the stump. They put a premium on glibness and showmanship, and greatly penalize a candidate for verbal slips or unpolished gestures, neither of which has much relevance to governing. They prevent rather than promote any real discussion of complex issues, allowing candidates to get away with simplistic and/or distorted presentations that cannot be refuted effectively in the time allowed.

Affirmative rebuttal: The alternative is a series of campaigns consisting of ever more tightly controlled photo opportunities and slickly packaged TV spots. Debates offer an imperfect but valuable chance for a mass audience to try to distinguish image from reality.

That is a condensed summary of a debate about debates--or "metadebate" in the parlance of some experts--that has engaged politicians, journalists and voters. The Reagan-Mondale debates that concluded Sunday night gave fresh ammunition to each side. The mere fact that they were held makes it more likely that debates will crop up again as an issue in 1988, 1992 and subsequent campaigns.

Televised debates began only in 1960, when John Kennedy and Richard Nixon squared off, and then there were no more in a presidential race for 16 years. But the current campaign is the third in a row in which the contenders have confronted each other on-camera, and in a sped-up age, three repetitions acquire the force of tradition. Ronald Reagan strengthened that tradition by breaking the informal taboo against an incumbent President's agreeing to debate when he enjoys a long lead. Reagan thus set a precedent that future incumbents may defy only at the peril of being judged "chicken."*

But, for all that, should debates be the pivotal features of presidential campaigns? On that question, there is no agreement at all. The cases for and against debates begin with recognition of a simple fact: they are among the most popular programs television has ever put on. An average of 77 million people watched some portion of the four Kennedy-Nixon debates; the three Carter-Ford match-ups drew an average audience of 85 million. In 1980, 120 million took in at least part of the single Reagan-Carter debate. Preliminary estimates of the number who tuned in to the first Reagan-Mondale face-off are considerably lower, ranging from 70 million to 80 million, but even that represents a vastly greater audience than either candidate could reach in any other way. Moreover, these are mixed audiences that include, besides supporters of one candidate who ordinarily would not listen to the other, undecided voters and, no doubt, many people who usually pay little attention to politics but are drawn by the drama of confrontation.

The size of the audience, say critics, is just the trouble: the enormous stakes make the debates highly artificial events bearing little if any resemblance to a genuine debate. Candidates who dare not take the risk of quizzing each other insist on a panel of journalists to pose the questions, which they usually answer with rehearsed minispeeches that may have little relation to what was asked. The discussion of issues gets squashed into two-minute spiels and one-minute rebuttals that are wildly oversimplified at best and all too often downright misleading. In past campaigns, charges New York Times Columnist Tom Wicker, "nothing . . . has spread more misinformation, more false claims and more just outright mischaracterizations of things than those debates have."

Worst of all, debate critics assert, the match-ups have turned into a game of gaffe exploitation. "Modern debates are the political version of the Indianapolis Speedway," charges Political Scientist Nelson Polsby of the University of California, Berkeley. "What we're all there for--the journalists, the political pundits, the public--is to see somebody crack up in flames." Trivial mistakes get blown out of all proportion. Harking back to some celebrated ones from past debates, Kansas Senator Robert Dole, the admitted loser of a TV match against Walter Mondale in 1976 when they were opposing candidates for Vice President, offers a caustic list of no-nos for debaters: "Don't quote your kids. They may be more informed ... Don't perspire. You might not believe it, but millions of people will be watching your upper lip."

Debate supporters generally reply in effect: If you think debates are bad, just try imagining what electronic-era campaigns would be like without them. "Most Americans," says Harvard Political Scientist Gary Orren, "would get their political information from two sources: either from the Pepsi-Cola-like ads that the candidates put out--and boy, they're getting good at it!--or through little snippets that are no longer than 1 min. 20 sec. on the nightly TV news." For all their artificiality, the debates offer voters a rare chance to see the candidates in a situation they do not totally control, and to gauge how they react to pressure and deal with the unexpected.

Austin Ranney, editor of a study of debates for the American Enterprise Institute, believes that these factors are important issues. His view: "We don't say, 'I believe in these 20 things and Reagan believes in 17 of them and Mondale in 14, so Reagan wins 17-14.' We're trying to determine what kind of people they are as human beings, how they will respond in times of crisis." Debates in their present format, he concedes, are "by no means ideal" for facilitating that judgment, but "what other chance do we have to compare them side by side?"

It is somewhat surprising that the most vehement critics of debates frequently agree that at least some of their defects might be remedied by staging more of them, perhaps four per campaign. That would lessen the crisis atmosphere, reduce the importance of a single miscue or devastating punch line ("There you go again") and--who knows?--perhaps even permit some real exploration of issues. Many experts also argue for changes in format. The leading suggestion is to have candidates question each other, with a moderator to enforce some rules. That would cut down on evasions, enable misstatements to be challenged immediately and give voters a better idea of how each candidate handles opposition. But the idea has drawbacks too. The debate might degenerate into an exchange of accusations, or the candidates might tacitly agree to shy away from an issue neither wants to discuss--abortion, for example.

Polsby suggests a different idea: "Extended conversations" during which each candidate would be quizzed separately for an hour at a time by four questioners, two chosen by himself and two selected by his opponent. That would permit deeper explorations of issues, but lack the pressure of a face-to-face test.

Perhaps the best approach would build on a suggestion from Ranney: A series of four debates with a different format for each, testing the candidates in a variety of settings. One might be a variation of an old-fashioned debate with stated topic, statements and rebuttals, and the candidates questioning each other; another could be a debate along present lines; the third and fourth might be modeled on Polsby's extended conversations. In some form, debates probably will and certainly should continue; the task is to prevent them from freezing into a mold that satisfies no one except the winner. --By George J. Church.

Reported by Barry Kalb/New York and John E. Yang/Washington

* Landslide Winners Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Nixon in 1972 did not debate their rivals; Incumbents Gerald Ford in 1976 and Jimmy Carter in 1980 agreed to participate only because their campaigns were in serious trouble, and ended up losing the elections.

With reporting by Barry Kalb, John E. Yang