The Great Debate Spate

By WALTER SHAPIRO

Any day now, the ads may start appearing on the covers of matchbooks: "Booming opportunities in the fastest growing field in America! Meet powerful people and appear on TV! If you've got a brain, we can train! Enroll now and enter the exciting world of Presidential Debate Moderators! Iowa and New Hampshire residents qualify for our special volume discount."

Farfetched? Not when you consider that 1987 has become the year of the Great Debate Spate. The seven Democratic contenders have already traded mild jabs on PBS and C-Span. Two more Democratic events are scheduled for September. On the Republican side, Moderator William Buckley will toss out the first bon mot on Oct. 28, when all six G.O.P. contenders, including an initially reluctant Vice President George Bush, appear on Firing Line.

By then, a full year before Election Day 1988, most candidates will be debating more often than members of the Oxford Union. Campaigns are besieged by would-be hosts; both Senator Paul Simon of Illinois and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis have more than 50 invitations to debate their Democratic rivals.

Talk is cheap, which may be the simplest explanation for this unexpected glut of gab. Cable television and inexpensive satellite hookups provide the perfect forum for sparring candidates to receive free media exposure. The possibility of wide-open races also contributes to the outbreak of political logorrhea. When a candidate is running behind "Undecided" in the polls, a debate gaffe holds little risk. Small wonder that the strongest resistance to an all-talk campaign comes from the handlers of Bush, the candidate with the most to lose. Campaign Manager Lee Atwater complains, "The thing is just getting out of hand."

For the Democrats, the initial face-offs have been polite enough to satisfy Miss Manners. During a forum at the Iowa County Fair in late August, Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee won headlines for his so-called aggressiveness toward Dukakis. In truth, Gore's criticisms were tepid in the extreme: "With all due respect to my friend from Massachusetts, we need some specifics." But with the Democrats in ideological tandem on everything from opposition to aid to the contras to horror at the Reagan deficits, any expression of individuality is treated as major news. The Republicans will soon be debating within their own philosophical straitjacket: the need to prove they are at least as conservative as the Reagan Administration.

Faced with the tedium of me-too panel discussions, candidates have created their own exhibition season. No longer does a contender have to wait to be nominated to experience the joys of hurling invective face-to-face at an opponent from the other party. Democrat Bruce Babbitt and Republican Pete du Pont invented the do-it-yourself presidential debate back in May as a way of calling attention to their long-shot candidacies. It may have been a gimmick, but their interparty face-off produced a vibrancy rarely matched in a campaign season devoid of transcendent issues.

Thus began a mating dance between candidates in both parties searching for the right yin to bring out their yang. The goal is also to challenge a strong contender, so Babbitt and du Pont have been locked out of the format they invented. So far, Democratic Congressman Richard Gephardt of Missouri has been the most successful practitioner of "Have Podium, Will Travel." Last month he goaded Dukakis into a matchup on trade, which was seen as a contest between self-appointed Democratic front runners. Gephardt was adroit too in finding the right Republican foil: New York Congressman Jack Kemp, who agreed to the first interparty doubleheader. In July the pair bludgeoned the trade issue to the ground in a meeting in Des Moines. But the real fireworks came last week, when they took the foreign policy portion of The Dick and Jack Show to Rivier College in Nashua, N.H.

There was no winner, except to the 200 partisans of the candidates grouped on each side of the small auditorium like friends of the bride and groom at a wedding. Debates are generally remembered for their snappy cracks, and Conservative Kemp got off the best when he said, "Dick makes me out to be some kind of hawk. I'm a dove! A heavily armed dove." Gephardt's specialty was carefully constructed parallelism: "Why do the Republican presidential candidates care more about military aid to Central America than farm aid in the center of America?"

Such verbal pyrotechnics mattered less than that the debate provoked one of the most passionate exchanges about the ideological differences separating Democratic liberals and G.O.P. conservatives:

Gephardt to Kemp: Deep down, you really believe there is no way to coexist with people who don't think the way we think. I don't think you believe we can negotiate with the Soviets on arms control. I don't think you believe we can negotiate with the Sandinistas . . . I think what you really believe is that the only answer for our foreign policy is to wipe out anybody who doesn't agree with us.

Kemp on Gephardt: Dick does more than genuflect to ((negotiations)), he worships at their shrine. Diplomacy is his shrine . . . Ladies and gentlemen, diplomacy cannot work without the use or the threat of force when you're dealing with a totalitarian government like the Soviet Union.

Not much to be thankful for: a few moments of unscripted clarity from two men who want to be the leader of the free world. But the days of such stark contrasts are probably fleeting. Dukakis last week declined a challenge from Kemp. With too many debates on their plates, the candidates are likely to stick to their own kind, and the seductive safety of preaching to the choir.