January/February 2001

January/February 2001 | Contents

THE DEBATES: ONE-MAN BAND

BY JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL

Jim Lehrer is everything a high-minded media critic looks for to moderate a high-stakes presidential debate. He has the authority not to be intimidated, the sophistication to home in on substance, and prestige enough not to be in need of the publicity he might garner from a reportorial ambush. Lehrer had all these qualities in spades. So why were his debates so disappointing?

Most debate moderators pose pointed questions. If those questions are not answered directly -- and often they are not -- the questioner will take at least one follow-up pass, if not necessarily to elicit an answer then to signify clearly that the answer has fallen short. Lehrer took another approach. Rather than posing particular questions that required specific answers, he preferred to lead the discussion by introducing general topics. He did sometimes follow up and pursue a topic in more detail, but seldom in a way that really pressed the candidates or made them pay a price for repeated evasions or lack of candor.

Consider, for instance, the way Lehrer introduced the discussion of foreign policy in the second debate, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He began by asking Governor Bush if he had "formed any guiding principles for exercising America's enormous power." And then a short time later he asked whether America's "wealth, our good economy, our power, bring with it special obligations to the rest of the world?" These were opening gambits, and Lehrer continued with questions about how to end the violence in the Middle East, whether President Clinton was right to go to war in the Balkans, and others. But they fairly suggest the style Lehrer pursued of setting an agenda and raising broad topics rather than narrowing in on specific questions or pressing the candidates to confront issues in difficult ways.

THE ROLE OF THE RULES

Much of Lehrer's passivity has been chalked up to the highly restrictive, training-wheels debate rules he was operating under -- rules that the candidates themselves had devised under the auspices of the Commission on Presidential Debates. These included the tightly drawn cycles of two-minute response and one-minute rebuttal, and, most important, the rule against candidates asking each other questions.

Yet the rules were not the only issue. Particularly during the second, "sit-down" debate, Lehrer's brief did allow him fairly wide latitude to pursue answers to questions that hadn't been fully addressed. But in a number of interviews after the debates, he made it quite clear that his general reluctance to do so was quite intentional and proper. Lehrer wanted to keep as low a profile as possible. His role, as he understood it, was not to force the candidates to address particular issues or embarrass them with awkward questions, but to foster give-and-take. If the candidates were insubstantial or evasive in their responses, that was their problem, not his.

The problem, of course, was that the rules not only didn't facilitate give-and-take between the candidates, they expressly forbade it. The model of moderator as referee might have made sense if Bush and Gore had been allowed to have at each other. But with the rules prohibiting candidate-to-candidate questioning, and Lehrer disinclined to fill the role, aggressive or even targeted questioning was largely gone from the mix.

In the famous 1993 Gore-Perot NAFTA debate on Larry King Live -- upon which much of Gore's reputation as a debater was built -- it was Gore's insistent questioning that compensated for King's notoriously softball style. It was much the same in the debates between Bradley and Gore, which are widely believed to have helped Gore beat back Bradley's surge in the winter of 1999. Gore garnered considerable bad press for hitting Bradley in debate after debate with the charge that Bradley's health care plan would abolish Medicaid without providing sufficient funds for current Medicaid recipients to purchase new coverage. There were some details to be quibbled over. But the charge had such political potency because it was true, and undeniably so. Again and again, Gore pummeled Bradley with the issue like the political equivalent of the young Mike Tyson; short on grace, mechanical in style, but with devastating power. These exchanges produced a lot of heat, but also a lot of light.

Yet there was a deeper assumption implicit in Lehrer's contention that it was up to the candidates to be forthcoming and compelling in their answers. He seemed to assume, to put it bluntly, that the debate was the candidates' show, rather than the voters' or the media's. Journalists normally see themselves as advocates or tribunes, if not of the people, then of some abstract interest in the elucidation of facts -- asking the hard questions, and so forth. Yet Lehrer seemed to see himself as something more like an emcee. He was on hand as a neutral arbiter to enforce the rules, to provide some sense of order, and direct the questioning. In the final analysis, the candidates were putting on a performance. And it wasn't his business to make sure they gave a particularly good one.

WHAT THE COMMISSION WANTS

And here we come to the central reason why Lehrer was not the right person and the Commission on Presidential Debates was not the right organization to host these affairs. Over the course of the election season the commission was frequently criticized for being beholden to the corporate interests that funded it, or more indirectly, to the two major parties whose representatives had founded it. But the debates themselves revealed something quite different: the commission didn't have too many interests but too few. In fact, it only had one interest: to hold debates. And that was precisely the problem. It had an interest only in holding something called a debate. Not necessarily a good debate, or one that forced the candidates to address issues in some journalistically meaningful way, or even one that forced them to answer difficult questions -- but almost any forum called a "debate" in which both candidates could agree to meet under an agreed-upon set of rules.

The commission had no independent journalistic interest or -- let's put it more baldly -- no independent interest in confrontation. Its officers certainly wouldn't characterize their role this way. But it pretty neatly captures the way they navigated the process, acceding to most any demands both candidates could agree on and placing few substantive requirements on how the debates would be organized.

MEANWHILE, IN BUFFALO...

In evaluating the Lehrer debates, the most illuminating counterpoints are those second most-watched debates of campaign 2000, between Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio. In the first debate in Buffalo, New York, NBC's Tim Russert, a Buffalo native, began a question for the First Lady by playing a videotape of her appearance on the Today show, in which she had defended her husband against accusations of adultery in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. "Do you regret misleading the American people?" Russert asked. "Would you now apologize for branding people as part of a vast right-wing conspiracy?"

It was an aggressive, even offensive, question. On its own merits it is hard to find anything redeeming about it. It was not only cruel; it also misjudged the moral calculus of the situation in which Mrs. Clinton had found herself. Russert was asking Clinton to apologize for having believed her husband's denial of adultery, and having repeated those denials in public. Perhaps on some deep personal level this showed some misjudgment, but hardly one that required a public apology. And yet the question produced one of the most revealing and significant moments of the campaign -- and one from which Clinton, improbably, seemed to benefit. Visibly knocked on her heels by the raw force of Russert's question, Clinton composed herself and responded with firmness and a humanity she does not always show.

RATINGS
Source: Nielsen Media Research

Debate Number 1: 46.5 million viewers

Debate Number 2: 37.6 million viewers

Debate Number 3: 37.7 million viewers

Season premier of
The West Wing: 25 million viewers

Though the consequences for the candidate were different, Russert's question was similar to Bernard Shaw's notorious decision in 1998 to ask Michael Dukakis if he would reconsider his opposition to capital punishment if his wife Kitty were raped and murdered. Shaw's question was more substantial. It was tied to a specific and legitimate question of public policy. But both questions were in their own way precisely the sort of nasty, gotcha questions that high-minded media critics so roundly decry. Yet such questions, outrageous as they may be on their own terms, inject an unpredictability and volatility that is refreshing in campaigns that are increasingly scripted and controlled.

This may be too high a price to pay for injecting spontaneity into dull elections. But they are only extreme examples of questions generated by formats far better geared to producing incisive and provocative exchanges. The first and second Clinton-Lazio debates also had banks of local journalists who brought different perspectives and viewpoints to the table and questions that never would have made it into Lehrer's more high-minded, disinterested exercise. In the second, these included the late Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News and the more Republican-friendly Greg Birnbaum of the New York Post.

Whether it was Russert's bombast or Nelson's and Birnbaum's engaged questioning, the Clinton-Lazio debates exemplified the importance of introducing a structure of competing interests into the format of a debate. Lehrer's role as sole moderator gave him little incentive, perhaps even a disincentive, to ask uncomfortable, even mildly rude questions. This made it much more natural that he would pursue the sort of gentlemanly and inoffensive questioning he generally did. A bank of questioners, each with their own concerns and viewpoints, and perhaps also, each with an interest in posing the memorable, news-making question, makes it very likely that candidates will be probed and prodded to a high and appropriate degree.

Given the swirl of interests involved in a presidential election, and focused on in a presidential debate, it simply may not be possible for one individual to appear fair in each party's eyes while not, as Lehrer did, becoming so inoffensive as to slip into insubstantiality.

PUTTING THE DEBATE BACK IN THE DEBATES

As the questioner, Lehrer should have been the stand-in for the voters. It was very much his problem if the candidates hemmed and hawed and avoided confronting issues of significant concern. It was his problem because it was the voters' problem. Gotcha journalism in some abstract, caricatured sense may be a bad thing, but a presidential debate should be something of a gantlet to pass. And this is precisely because presidential debates have seldom been actual debates in the ordinary sense of the word. The candidates don't actually debate each other. They have an interest in probing each other's weaknesses and stands on the issues. Organizers of debates should find ways to let them do so, even compel them to do so, if they can. In a political culture that prizes affability and agreeableness in its candidates, this may not always be possible. If it's not, and when it's not, journalists must do what they do best: ask hard questions and take the consequences.

Joshua Micah Marshall is Washington editor of The American Prospect. His articles on politics and culture have also appeared in Salon, Slate, Feed, the New York Post, Newsday, and The New Republic.

Find out what Jim Lehrer thought of the debates. Click here.