Do debates, a staple of political campaigns, actually matter. We take a run at several of them ranging from Lincoln Douglas to Trump Biden to get the answer.
Do debates, a staple of political campaigns, actually matter. We take a run at several of them ranging from Lincoln Douglas to Trump Biden to get the answer.
Debating the Value of Debates
November 2023
I love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.
Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
“Presidential debates have been a hot mess for years. Candidates regularly sidestep questions, interrupt each other, and exceed their allotted response time. The entire exercise seems engineered to produce a gotcha moment that goes viral. Voters are left with very little substance to inform their decisions.”
Mark Bohl, Americans United
Have you ever argued with someone and you know you were poorly articulating your position? Then, five minutes later, the exact right line comes to you, but too late. “Darn, if I had just said that, I would have toasted them.” We all want that stinging rebuke, the haymaker, the one moment in a debate when the right line comes thundering out. Many also want it in professional political debates. A candidate provides the pithy put-down everyone remembers.
One of the first live ones in my memory was this from, albeit, a Vice Presidential debate in 1988 featuring Lloyd Bentsen against a hapless Dan Quayle.
Senator Quayle: I have far more experience than many others that sought the office of vice president of this country. I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency. I will be prepared to deal with the people in the Bush administration if that unfortunate event would ever occur.
Senator Bentsen: Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy. (followed by prolonged shouts and applause.)
HUA! That certainly put the little twerp in his place. Quayle’s reaction to Bentsen’s comment was played and replayed by the Democrats in their subsequent television ads as an announcer intoned: “Quayle: just a heartbeat away.” It proved sure-laugh fodder for comedians, and increasingly, editorial cartoons depicted Quayle as a child. Saturday Night Live used a child actor to portray Quayle in several sketches.
The only problem? Bentsen and the man at the top of the ticket, Michael Dukakis, lost badly to Quayle and George HW Bush. It was the last time a GOP candidate got above 53% of the popular vote and over 400 votes in the Electoral College. The best showing since then was 50% of the popular vote in 2004. And looming over the entire 1988 election, child Quayle and all, was Ronald Reagan who, like Teddy Roosevelt with William Taft and Andrew Jackson with Martin Van Buren, had the massive charisma necessary to propel their candidates to victory. Nevertheless, everyone remembers the line, but few link to the outcome.
So, is this an example that VP debates do not matter? Hardly. Let’s recall the debate between a 2012 version of Joe Biden and Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan. Politico said of the clash, “Vice President Joe Biden delivered an extraordinarily aggressive, top-to-bottom attack on the Romney-Ryan ticket Thursday, repeatedly interrupting and even laughing at Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan during the lone vice presidential debate of the 2012 campaign.” The interesting aspect was not just Biden’s performance. It represented probably the only time that Barack Obama took a cue from his VP. As Politico noted “The debate was a head-snapping role reversal from last week’s first presidential debate in Denver, which featured a subdued Barack Obama and a combative, insistent Mitt Romney.” In the next debate, which we will discuss later, Obama emulated Biden. Words that have been written, oh, well, just this one time.
For those Democrats who today, in September 2023, insist that Biden is acceptable for a 2nd term, I would like to cite this now 13-year-old debate. It is not just that Biden dominated the younger, and no doubt much brighter Ryan; he cited facts and figures from across the Obama administration and pummeled some of the Romney proposals and even Ryan’s tenure in the House. We have a Biden today who cannot even read a 10-minute message from the teleprompter. 13 years ago, he went at it for 90 minutes without a campaign-stalling gaffe. He is not only not the same man from 13 years ago; he is not the same man who ran for President three years ago.
When I ran a search for the first debate in world history, the brilliance of the AI’s Google algorithm produced the Nixon-Kennedy televised debate. It is understandable to be wary of AI, but it is not there yet, folks.
Sorry, Google and the nothing happened before 1900 centric view of history. There were a few other debates before 1960. Political debates in ancient Rome were conducted with harshness, “The attacks, also known as invectives, were an integral part of public life for senators of the Roman Republic,” explains ancient historian Prof. Dr. Martin Jehne.
“Severe devaluations of the political opponent welded the support group together and provided attention, entertainment, and indignation—similar to insults, threats.”
A reformation-era debate in Leipzig took place in 1519, two years after Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses was pounded on the door of the Wittenberg Church. The participants in the debate were Andreas Karlstadt, a Protestant theologian at the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Eck a Catholic prelate and professor at the University of Ingolstadt, and Luther himself. The debate centered on grace and free will and was initiated by Karlstadt and Eck in June 1519. Luther entered the discussion a month later, taking Karlstadt’s place. By then, Eck had branded Luther a heretic, and Luther had replied with his public attacks on Eck.
For the history of our American Republic, inarguably, the most outstanding example of losing the debate battle but winning the policy war was the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. There are so many biographies of Lincoln by talented writers. Still, the citation I am using here is from a Lincoln biographer who actually participated in many political debates, South Dakota Senator, historian and respected debater George McGovern. The South Dakotan never got a chance for a presidential debate, however. When he ran for President in 1972, the incumbent, Richard Nixon, refused to debate on the pretext that it demeaned the office of President. Uh-huh. Nixon might have been still smarting over his debate loss to John F Kennedy twelve years earlier, though those listening on the radio to the 1960 debate thought Nixon had won. But on TV, there was the youthful dynamic of Kennedy versus Nixon and his flop sweat.
Or the canny Nixon probably guessed what was coming, a landslide victory over the then, too liberal McGovern. And there was the fact that McGovern was believed to be one of the best debaters of his age. Why would Nixon put himself into a situation with so much downside for his campaign. A calculation a certain GOP candidate of 2023 is making as we speak. So, I thought it would be interesting to get an expert’s take on the Lincoln-Douglas debates. And unlike so many journalists or ex politicians turned historian, McGovern is not an amateur, having authored over a dozen history books.
“The Lincoln-Douglas debates became one of the seminal political events in the history of American politics. Thousands of people attended the boisterous affairs, traveling by rail, horse, and wagon. Newspapers around the country closely followed the contest between the “Little Giant,” and “Honest Abe.” The two men were a contrast in styles as much as political ideology. Douglas was refined, energetic, and supremely confident. He traveled in high style by private rail car, surrounded by advisors and in the company of his beautiful young wife, Adele. Lincoln was gawky, unkempt, and unassuming. He traveled alone, a forlorn figure with a tattered carpet bag on this lap, lost in silent thought.”
McGovern then covers the content of these debates:
“The debates followed similar themes. Douglas defended popular sovereignty as the great American and democratic principle, the truest form of self-government. Douglas argued that that the country had been found on a white basis, made for the white man for the benefit of the white man.” Douglas also argued that Lincoln’s position of a “house divided” was war mongering.
At this stage of his career, Lincoln did not believe in full equality (especially in the debates in Southern Illinois). He eschewed the idea of blacks holding office or serving on juries. But Lincoln attacked slavery with great fervor, insisting that blacks should be entitled to their labor and that this freedom was guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence. “Slavery was wrong and will always be wrong, and that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent.”
Part of Lincoln’s genius was to place the founding of the Republic not on the passage of the Constitution, ratified by slave states, but the year of the declaration of Independence in 1776.
Lincoln proclaimed the vision of Liberty captured in that document. It was why a later speech, the Gettysburg Address, he famously intoned four score and seven years ago, not three score and sixteen.
Initially, Lincoln’s presidency was based on preserving the Union. Still, as the Civil War raged on, he would go back to these remarks captured at the Lincoln-Douglas debates and put the end of slavery front and center.
In the end, Douglas won that 1858 Illinois Senatorial election, but due to Lincoln’s impressive showing, he was soon being courted to be the Republican Party’s nominee in 1860. Again, Lincoln lost the election, but without these debates and the fame they engendered, Lincoln’s career and the fate of our nation would be quite different.
The National Constitution Center, like the Conservative Historian, is not averse to lists.
They feature ten debates that mattered, and we have covered three of their first four. One on their list is puzzling. A possible debate in 1940 between Wendell Willkie and Franklin Roosevelt, like a Nixon McGovern debate, never happened. “FDR declined, perhaps knowing Willkie bested future Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in a 1938 radio debate. Given Roosevelt’s ability as a public speaker, this could have been interesting!” As it happened, FDR got 54% of the popular vote and carried over 400 electoral votes. Yet it was the lowest % of his first three elections, so perhaps wise not to give Willkie any chance.
In 1976, after the Nixon-induced debate hiatus, President Gerald Ford, the only president to assume the office without ever having run on a national ticket, debated Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter and made that dreaded gaffe. He stated that Poland and Eastern Europe weren’t under the Soviet Union’s influence. The fact that a debate could come down to one such line is silly, but this was not good for an incumbent president during the height of the Cold War.
In terms of Ronald Reagan’s run for the presidency, the former actor and California governor, not surprisingly, often excelled on the debate platform. In 1980, he swung around a contentious New Hampshire primary debate by reminding debate organizers that he had “paid for that microphone.” He then bested Carter with one of those damning phrases; “there you go again.” An implication that Carter was falsely illustrating Reagan’s position, time and again.
In 1984, after an abysmal showing in the 1st debate with Walter Mondale, it seemed as if Reagan, at age 73, was getting too old for the job, especially compared with his 56-year-old opponent. Reagan came back and, in many ways, put the election away with a single line.
Well into their debate, Henry Trehwitt, the diplomatic correspondent of The Baltimore Sun, raised what became the debate’s instant “sound bite” exchange.
Trewitt said: “Mr. President, I want to raise an issue that I think has been lurking for two or three weeks and cast it specifically in national security terms. “You already are the oldest President in history. And some of your staff say you were tired after your most recent [debating] encounter with Mr. Mondale. I recall that President [John F.] Kennedy had to go for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuban missile crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you could function in such circumstances?”
Reagan responded: “Not at all, Mr. Trehwitt, and I also want you to know that I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth, and inexperience.”
Even Mondale had to laugh at that one. It was vintage Reagan, and he never looked back.
Later in 1992, in a critical moment in the second 1992 presidential debate, President George H.W. Bush was seen checking his watch when his opponent, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton was being asked a question about the national debt. Clinton was engaging in a personal conversation with an audience member no less. The perception was frozen in people’s minds that the supposed out-of-touch, HW Bush, had better things to do. Bill Clinton played his saxophone on late night TV. HW Bush, in another out of context moment, was shown being confused by a grocery store scanner as if he had never been to grocery store prior to that moment. The watch moment only cemented the perception. Print the legend as the editor said in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.
In a 2011 GOP Primary debate, the Texas Governor forgot the answer to a question he had started about eliminating three federal departments. After Ron Paul offers to help, Perry admits he can’t remember the third agency. The gaffe effectively ended the Perry campaign.
And returning to the second of Barack Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s 2012 three debates. In the first, Obama indeed seemed subdued, but taking that Biden cue was more forceful in the 2nd. But it was really two against one. This is from Scott Paulsen, writing at the time,
“On Tuesday night during the second presidential debate, Candy Crowley was supposed to be the moderator – not a participant! She took it upon herself to participate in the debate with President Obama and Mitt Romney. In post-analysis of the debate, it is obvious that Crowley inserted her comments and directives to stop numerous comments blatantly assisting President Obama. She also found it necessary to tell Mitt Romney to “sit down” at one point, yet never told the “standing president” to do the same when Romney had the floor. Most blatantly, she interjected the untruth regarding Mitt Romney’s absolutely accurate claim near the end of the debate that President Obama did not, in fact, tell the American people that the attack at the Libyan consulate on September 11 was a terrorist attack on the day after the attack when he spoke in the Rose Garden. The moderator and one participant – Obama – were partners. Romney, throughout the debate, was the “man out.” This debate was not a team event as much as Crowley’s performance made portions of the debate appear to be a teaming of Crowley and Obama against Romney.”
And as with so much of Obama, there is an empty suit quality to him, all form and no substance, political cunning but no real intellect. For example, here was his take on Romney’s concern about Russia in the third debate. Romney named Russia, not China, as our number one geopolitical foe, which Obama sniffed. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” So two years after that debate, Russia conquered Crimea and, ten years later, invaded the country, beginning the largest war in Europe since the 1940s. They did so with help from their pals in Iran and China. Romney is right, Obama wrong.
In the final debate we will cover, it was my opinion that Donald Trump lost the election to Joe Biden in two days. The first was a non-campaign moment. At the beginning of the COVID crisis, when experts from across the government assembled in the press room at the White House to discuss the pandemic, Trump rambled on for 45 minutes while three department heads and a host of medical experts watched. You could even see them shift their feet as if desiring a chair. At least none looked at their watch. The message was explicit. Trump cares more about hearing his voice than educating Americans about what was then an unknown and mysterious virus killing our people. Most presidents from Lincoln to Wilson to FDR can use international crises to their advantage. Trump fumbled his opportunity.
The second day he lost the election was on the debate stage. As Fox News reported (I am intentionally citing Fox because NPR or CNN or the traditional media already have a bone to pick with Trump, so by even Fox standards, this is damning, “Trump came out swinging, but Biden held his own and didn’t fall into previous debate pitfalls where he cut his time short or stumbled to get out responses. The two men often talked over each other in a brawl that got unwieldy at times.” Even Laura Ingraham stated, “‘Raucous’ Trump-Biden debate shows traditional format ‘doesn’t work very well.”
Of the many mistakes Trump made that night, talking over Biden and dominating the time was the worst. For months, Biden had declined, ostensibly because of COVID, to emerge from his Delaware home and take to the campaign trail. So Trump painted Biden as a senile old fool who could barely put on his drool cup. With precious few minutes to speak, Biden came off as reasonably cogent and, indeed, as his trait, feisty, calling Trump a liar and clown. It is when Biden gets into long answers and has to go off the script that, unlike his 2012 self, gets him into deep trouble. Trump spared him the effort because he did all the talking for both men. Trump thought he was being dominant. To the suburban women around Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta who decide elections today, he came off as a loud-mouthed boar, and they witnessed no such Biden dementia.
There were seven Lincoln/Douglas debates held throughout the state of Illinois and as noted, lasting for hours, on a single topic. It is almost impossible to see candidates conduct more than three debates today, much less seven. When I watch debates now, I can practically see the candidates desperately trying to remember their lines like a bad actor frantically recalling the words of a Shakespeare soliloquy. Impromptu thinking, or any thinking at all? Like men’s soccer, er, futbol, the candidates play not to win, but not to lose. They all live in fear of becoming the next Dan Quayle or Rick Perry. So they remember 60-second sound bites and recite them, or as Chris Christie so accurately said of the odious Vivek Ramaswamy, a chat GPT program. They defer answering the questions asked in place for the question they wanted to hear.
The formats do us no favors and inflict harm on the discourse. Because of the government’s size and scope and America’s place on the world stage, we run our candidates through a list of their sound bites on all policies. In less than two hours, one recent debate tried to get seven people to comment cogently on 15 different questions. In the age of OCD, shiny penny Twitter, and TikTok, the timing of answers is ridiculous. Two minutes to answer questions such as “How would you improve the economy?,” what is your immigration policy,” or “How would you manage China.” With just a few minutes, this fosters a two-sentence dribble that tells us nothing of what any of these people would do if they actually had to manage these things. And that assumes they even get that long before the smug, Tracie Flick wannabe Ramaswamy jumps in. Patience and hearing out your opponent is for suckers and squishes.
We have seen the GOP reduce the number of candidates from eight to seven to five.
This is too many, regardless. A hard cap should be put at five candidates with standards so high, such a number could only be obtained if each has very similar numbers. The fact that you had Ron DeSantis, who at one time was polling with 18%, on a stage with Asa Hutchison, who never broke 1%, is silly.
Then, instead of the potpourri of possible questions, you take a poll, and only the top three or four issues get a debate. Force the American people to tell their priorities, then make the candidates answer on their positions. And no more 2-minute answers. “Governors DeSantis and Haley, immigration has made our list; please provide a 7-10 answer, each, on your policy regarding Immigration.” And so forth. Finally, a kill switch on the other candidates while one is answering. Only one person speaks at a time.
These people aim to run a 4 trillion government (too big, and Congress should be doing more), but this is the executive branch today. They are not looking to get a title bout at the next Smackdown event, nor debating whether Michael Jordan is better than LeBron James. No doubt some fool thinks the yelling is great theater and encourages this nonsense. Those who believe that a United States Presidential debate should resemble anything like a reality TV program should never be close to another debate again.
And let’s take these things away from cable news hosts. When the normally even tempered Brett Baier cannot help but inject himself into the proceedings, or his bosses crave big numbers, initiating a Gladiatorial spectacle rather than a true debate, it is time to return these things to more measured people. Ask the question, then shut the heck up.
Do debates matter? There is plenty of evidence that they do, and entire presidencies have been won because of them. The economy, crime, immigration, and war in the Middle East are questions that determine the lives we lead or the deaths we may encounter. We need a debate format as serious as these issues.