by From Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates
This time I did not completely miss it, because Bush’s body language, including his facial gestures, were obvious while he was answering questions as well as when he was listening to Kerry’s.
Asked afterward about this, President Bush said, “I guess I didn’t learn any lessons from the first debate in 2000.”
“I certainly was aware of his answers and some of the body language,” said Senator Kerry, “but you can never tell what is translating into that now plasma screen or box or whatever.”
There was also a lingering nonstory about the so-called mystery bulge. Somebody spotted what appeared to be a small box-shaped rectangular bulge under the back of Bush’s suit coat.
There was speculation that it was an electronic receiver of some kind hidden there to help prompt Bush with his answers. Or maybe it was a bulletproof vest.
No, no, said Bush spokesmen, it was the result of bad tailoring. There was nothing there but a natural “pucker.” President Bush, two weeks after the debate, made light of it himself on Good Morning America. “I guess the assumption is that if I were straying off course they would, kind of like a hunting dog, they would punch a buzzer and I would jerk back into place. It’s just absurd.”
Still, the story stayed alive for several weeks on the Internet and elsewhere and, before it was over, a veteran photo-imaging specialist at NASA was recruited to do some serious inquiry.
It should come as no surprise that I, again the outsider closest to the candidates during the debate, saw no bulge. I was focused on the fronts of the president and the senator, not their backs.
There was a personal high point conclusion to that September 30, 2004, debate evening when the family and team gathered in a private dining room at the Biltmore to celebrate the thirteenth birthday of our grandson Ian.
My birthday present to Ian was my $145 red debate tie, which I took from around my neck and presented to him in the company of great cheers and fanfare.
CHARLES GIBSON OF ABC moderated the Bush-Kerry town hall debate at Washington University in St. Louis a week later. There was a moderator-in-charge process that was similar to the one in 2000, but Gibson had a much better time of it than I did.
“The fact that they allowed me to make up the rules and then to pick out the questions was really empowering,” he said afterward. “I thought that in the end the public was pretty well served by the evening.”
On October 13, 2004, in Tempe, Arizona, Bob Schieffer of CBS moderated the third and final Bush-Kerry event, which, after the early switch, was about domestic policy.
The major news came after Schieffer asked Kerry if he believed homosexuality was a choice. “We’re all God’s children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as. I think if you talk to anybody, it’s not a choice.”
That answer drew harsh criticism from Dick Cheney, among others, for bringing a personal family matter into the national political dialogue.
Did Kerry have any regrets for what he did? “No, none whatsoever. I thought the criticism was contrived and inappropriate. I was trying to show that people can be completely embracing and affectionate of it and totally accepting of it, and obviously it is also important because there’s such a contradiction in the public position of that administration. So they can do it privately, but they can’t do it publicly and they play to different politics, and I thought it was important for people to understand that.”
Kerry and Bush understandably had many differing views of the debates, including the town hall format. Bush told me he had grown to like “moving around—it relaxes the debater.”
Kerry very much disliked the format.
“I had ninety seconds to talk to America about why I thought what I thought.” He cited the question about how he would rate himself as an environmentalist.
“My God, we’re talking about global climate change, cancer, health, security, energy independence, pollution of our waterways, loss of our fisheries, countless issues, and we had ninety seconds to talk about it in the most viewed moment of a presidential race.”
Kerry blamed all of the restrictive debate rules on Bush and his people, particularly when they insisted the answers be short and that there be no direct questions between the candidates.
The differing comments that mattered most, of course, were about substance.
I asked Bush—in the debate—if the Iraq experience made it more likely or less likely that he would take the United States into another preemptive military action.
BUSH: I would hope I never have to. I understand how hard it is to commit troops. Never wanted to commit troops. When I was running—when we had the debate in 2000, never dreamt I’d be doing that. But the enemy attacked us, Jim, and I have a solemn duty to protect the American people, to do everything I can to protect us.…
KERRY: Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, ‘The enemy attacked us.’ Saddam Hussein didn’t attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaida attacked us.… That’s the enemy that attacked us. That’s the enemy that attacked us. That’s the enemy that was allowed to walk out of those mountains. That’s the enemy that is now in sixty countries, with stronger recruits.…
BUSH: First of all, of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that. And secondly, to think that another round of resolutions would have caused Saddam Hussein to disarm, disclose, is ludicrous, in my judgment. It just shows a significant difference of opinion.
In our interview later, Kerry said he felt he had won that first debate on substance.
“I think I had an opportunity to break down the stereotypes, and I also had an opportunity to show the upside of what I was thinking and the downside of what he was thinking.”
Bush conceded that he came in second in that debate, because of his facial expressions, if nothing else.
“Look, the interesting thing about presidential debates is that I don’t think you ever win them, but you darn sure can lose them.”
WHATEVER THE LEVEL of hostility between Kerry and Bush, the real antagonism was between their running mates.
The sit-at-a-table format did not have the calming effect for Dick Cheney and John Edwards that it did for Cheney and Joe Lieberman four years earlier.
“I didn’t have those same feelings with respect to Senator Edwards,” Cheney said in our documentary interview. “That was more confrontational.”
Edwards agreed. “It was tense and confrontational from the beginning until the end. It was exhausting, actually, because of that.”
Gwen Ifill moderated that ninety minutes at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Did Edwards go into that debate in an attack mode?
“Yeah,” Edwards said afterward. “I felt that because I had watched the Cheney-Lieberman [debate] from 2000 I felt like that had gone too easy for Cheney, and I thought he needed to be challenged from the beginning so that there was a real interaction.”
The debate confrontation went immediately to the Iraq war.
Cheney was strongly supportive. “What we did in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do. If I had it to recommend all over again, I would recommend exactly the same course of action. The world is far safer today because Saddam Hussein is in jail, his government is no longer in power. And we did exactly the right thing.”
Edwards came back. “Mr. Vice President, you are still not being straight with the American people. I mean, the reality you and George Bush continue to tell people, first, that things are going well in Iraq—the American people don’t need us to explain this to them, they see it on their television every single day.”
It went to Iraq and 9/11.
EDWARDS: And these connections—I want the American people to hear this very clearly. Listen carefully to what the vice president is saying, becaus
e there is no connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September eleventh—period.
CHENEY: The senator has got his facts wrong. I have not suggested there’s a connection between Iraq and 9/11, but there’s clearly an established Iraqi track record with terror. Now, the fact of the matter is, the big difference here, Gwen, is they [Edwards and Kerry] have got a very limited view about how to use U.S. military forces to defend America. It’s a consistent pattern over time of always being on the wrong side of defense issues.
And, finally, to Halliburton.
EDWARDS: We also thought it was wrong to have a $20 billion fund out of which $7.5 billion was going to go to a no-bid contract for Halliburton, the vice president’s former company. It was wrong then. It’s wrong now.
Edwards intentionally brought up Halliburton very early in the debate, “because I thought it undermined the vice president’s credibility,” he said later. “You know he was continuing to try and claim that he was concerned about ordinary people, concerned about the war, and I just thought that the whole issue of Halliburton and his history with Halliburton undermined his credibility.”
Cheney deflected the Halliburton issue by charging that Edwards was only trying to obscure his and John Kerry’s record. What riled him the most, however, was Edwards’s mention of his daughter.
That came after Ifill asked Cheney about current administration policy on same-sex marriage in light of what he had said four years before: “Freedom means freedom for everybody.”
CHENEY: Gwen, you’re right, four years ago in this debate, the subject came up. And I said then and I believe today that freedom does mean freedom for everybody. People ought to be free to choose any arrangement they want. It’s really no one else’s business. That’s a separate question from the issue of whether or not government should sanction or approve or give some sort of authorization, if you will, to these relationships.
Traditionally, that’s been an issue for the states. States have regulated marriage, if you will. That would be my preference.…
EDWARDS: … Let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can’t have anything but respect for the fact that they’re willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It’s a wonderful thing.
About that exchange, Cheney said later, “It was the way it came up, related to a family member, to talk about one of my children, that was the wrinkle that I thought was not in the best taste, if I can put it in those terms. I thought it was a bit of a cheap shot.”
How did he handle his anger?
“Controlled it.”
Edwards didn’t see it as a cheap shot.
“I think he is just dead wrong. I honestly thought this was something to be admired. I thought the American people would respond really positively to what the vice president had done. I thought it was an example of a difference between the vice president and the president. That was the point I was making, because I agreed with what he had been doing within his family, and I didn’t agree with what President Bush was doing.”
Cheney believes that when Kerry brought up his daughter’s sexual orientation in the second presidential debate it ultimately hurt the Kerry-Edwards cause.
From the moderator’s perspective, Gwen Ifill told me that the anticipation of fireworks between Cheney and Edwards was difficult to deal with—at first.
“I was a near basket case myself going in because of the pressure I felt from moderating such a high-stakes event as that for the first time,” she said. “But the candidates and their staffs were so much more tense and nervous than I was.… I felt better, I relaxed and I was fine.”
She said she had absolutely no second thoughts about raising the same-sex marriage issue to Cheney in light of his “freedom means freedom for everybody” line four years before in the Lieberman debate.
As with Lieberman, there has been a major moving-on PS to John Edwards’s candidacy for vice president—a heartbeat away from the most powerful job in the world. Edwards became a disgraced star of the tabloids after admitting in 2010 that he had a child out of wedlock with a campaign aide while his wife, Elizabeth, was being treated for breast cancer. The Edwardses divorced before Elizabeth died in December 2010.
Meanwhile, Dick Cheney became a hit of anti-Obama outspokenness on the Sunday-morning talk shows after leaving office in 2009 with the lowest poll approval ratings in history.
THE BUSH-KERRY debate in Miami spawned two unusual entertainment creations.
In 2005, I received a phone call from Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr., then one of the executive producers and writers for the NBC drama series The West Wing. He was—is—a man of many careers, having worked as an actor, a Senate staffer, and a political analyst on MSNBC.
His pitch to me was straightforward. He wanted me to moderate a live debate on The West Wing between their two fictional candidates for president—Arnold Vinick, the Republican nominee played by Alan Alda, and Matt Santos, the Democrat portrayed by Jimmy Smits.
My first reaction was pleasant, appreciative—and negative. It might be fun, sure, but there was no way I could do that. I am a journalist, not an actor. Besides, we have rules at The NewsHour against journalists doing such things—rules that I helped write.
O’Donnell said it would be done on a set that would be a virtual re-creation of the two-podium arrangement that marked the real event in Florida. Every detail would be replicated. It would not be completely scripted. I would have full editorial control of what questions I asked.
I was a longtime viewer and fan of The West Wing. I thought it was the first believable take on what went on in real Washington and the West Wing, the White House, and the U.S. Capitol. The characters and dialogue rang true.
O’Donnell asked if I had been following the current story line—the race to succeed the retiring president played by Martin Sheen. Yes, pretty much so, I said. O’Donnell said he would overnight several DVDs of the most recent episodes, including one that had yet to air.
I heard myself telling him how much I admired the acting of the entire cast of The West Wing. I praised Smits, mentioning his performance on NYPD Blue as detective Bobby Simone. And Alan Alda, well, he was one of the great actors of our time.
We want the real thing, O’Donnell said. We want it to be a real debate. There would be few rules. The story line already called for the candidates to dramatically scrap them as the debate opened. The candidates could question and talk to each other directly. Would I at least consider doing it?
Okay, okay. Give me a day or two.
I ran it by Kate and the family, NewsHour leaders Les Crystal and Linda Winslow, and Robert MacNeil, my friend and retired partner. All of them pretty much reacted the same way. After a brief pause, each asked if I really wanted to. That question again. I gave some kind of answer that said yes, I guess I do. It could be terrific fun. MacNeil said I had earned the right to interpret our own rules however I wanted to. It could be justified on the grounds that it would be good publicity for The NewsHour.
I got only one strong are-you-nuts? reaction from a personal friend with both political and movie connections. The rest were more or less positive.
The next day I was ready to call O’Donnell with my happy acceptance. Then I came to my senses. I managed to grab my ego by my professional whatevers and told O’Donnell how much I appreciated being asked, but I could not do it. Nothing had changed. Journalists should not play themselves in movies or on TV dramas.
So on the night of November 6, 2005, Vinick/Alda debated Santos/Smits without me. Forrest Sawyer, a former network correspondent, was the moderator. All three did their respective jobs well. The subjects were real—Head Start, jobs, gun control, alternative energy sources, and leadership, among others. The exchanges and the debate itself did have a sound and feel of reality to them. O’Donnell and company, I thought, did an excellent job.
The format was wide-open after th
e candidates/actors agreed, right at the beginning, to drop all rules—just like Peter Jennings had suggested back in 1988.
Then came a ninety-minute one-act play called The Strangerer by Mickle Maher that premiered in 2007 at the Chopin Theater in Chicago and made an Off-Broadway run at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York the next year.
It had only three characters—George W. Bush, John Kerry, and me.
The set was a replica of the Miami debate stage. The actor playing me takes the moderator chair and then, on cue to an imaginary television camera, says exactly what I said in opening the real debate:
“Good evening from the University of Miami Convocation Center in Coral Gables, Florida—”
Following those and the rest of my real opening words, the actor playing Kerry gives the senator’s real answer about how he believes he can make America safer than President Bush can. Then the stage directions take the drama in a surprising course:
[BUSH takes out a knife and approaches LEHRER’S desk. He stabs LEHRER in the back. LEHRER collapses. BUSH steps back. Lights fade slowly to black, as a softly dramatic, melancholic theme plays over the sound of a rising wind. After a brief blackout: Lights up. LEHRER is back at his table, the candidates at their lecterns.]
The Lehrer character says good evening again, welcomes everyone to the debate again, and explains that the knife used to stab “me” was not an actual knife. It was a prop.
Then Kerry is asked the “America safer” question again. As Kerry repeats his answer, there is a second stage direction.
[BUSH pulls out a handgun, strides over to LEHRER, takes aim, and fires, once. LEHRER clutches his chest, gasps, falls on the floor. BUSH then fires four shots into his prostrate body.]
So it goes.
The next time Bush comes up to me with a pillow.
[BUSH has the pillow over LEHRER’S face. Pushes him down on the desk. LEHRER struggles, gets hold of the pillow, pulls away. There is a tug-of-war with pillow. Music continues, lights dimming still.]