by Lee Bockhorn

With the fall elections fast approaching, the last realistic chance for Bob Dole to make up ground on President Clinton has come and gone with the passage of the presidential debates. While they lacked any one defining moment that might have turned things around for Dole, they were instructive in the evidence they gave us for the perilous state of American democracy and the pernicious effect of television on it.

The debates were, for the most part, boring enough to justify the low viewership ratings they received. In reality they were not debates in the traditional sense so much as separate press conferences for the two candidates held in the same location. One heard the same tired soundbites from both --"build a bridge to the future," "my word is my bond," "tax scheme," and on and on. Anyone who has viewed even a few of the campaign commercials that have saturated the airwaves over the last several months has already heard most of these phrases hundreds of times.

As for the candidates' performances, Dole did fairly well considering the low expectations for his performance against the rhetorically gifted Clinton. He even managed to make some progress in softening his image by telling a few good one-liners to reveal the dry wit which he has been known for in Washington for many years. (He also managed to look rather silly by encouraging America's youth to visit his Web page at the end of the first debate). Unfortunately, Dole found himself between a rock and a hard place -- needing to attack Clinton on the character issue, but unable to do so effectively because of the risk of lending any more credence to people's view of him as a mean, grumpy old man. Clinton, on the other hand, had the relatively easy task of staying "on message" and avoiding the urge to respond to Dole's character attacks in order to appear "presidential." He was annoyingly effective at continuing to characterize Dole's tax plan as a "scheme" that would "blow a hole in the deficit"-- a phrase that, between Clinton and Gore, was used at least 12 times to my best estimate in the three debates. (If anything needs a hole blown into it, it is Mr. Clinton's enormous ego -- but I digress...)

The vice-presidential debate offered more hope for Republicans of a good performance from their side. Unfortunately, Jack Kemp's usual eloquence in illuminating the conservative gospel of entrepreneurship and free market capitalism seemed to leave him under the pressurized atmosphere of a national audience. While he displayed his ever-present enthusiasm for his beliefs, he often stumbled verbally to the point of appearing unprepared, and several times he seemed to wander around looking for a big finish to a response, only to end with a whimper. Gore was in his usual irritating form, plodding along in his slow, monotone, Tennessee drawl. He chanted the "tax scheme" phrase to the point of ridiculous redundancy, and repeated his mantra about the Democrats "protecting Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment" so many times that by the end of the debate, you could tell when it was coming next and recite it in unison with him word for word. Perhaps the most annoying thing about this particular debate was the way Kemp and Gore made such a fuss about having a "civil" debate, and then seeing Gore continue to call Dole's tax cut plan a "scheme." It is one thing to debate about the merit or lack thereof in Dole's plan, but it is another thing entirely to call it a "scheme," which implicitly questions the motivations of a man who nearly gave his life for his country.

What has struck me most in preparing this article is just how few people here at the U of M paid any attention to these debates. In the course of trying to gauge some student opinion on the debates in general, I was hard pressed to find anyone who had watched even one of the them. While there were many legitimate reasons to tune out on these debates, which I will address momentarily, it is a sad commentary on our generation that we seem all too willing to fulfill the "apathetic" label we are so often given. Having said that, I myself admit that I found these "debates" boring enough to flip the channel to baseball every once in a while. I think there are several reasons why this was so.

One of the frustrating things one noticed while watching the debates was just how often the candidates simply didn't answer the questions asked of them. There were two reasons that they did this -- in some cases, they didn't feel comfortable answering a question on a particular topic, so they steered their responses towards prepared soundbites (Dole took this route when posed with a question about his statements concerning tobacco -- he changed the subject quickly to drugs); the other reason was that they wanted to rebut something that their opponent had said during their response to the prior question. Sometimes they used up to half of their response time just to "clarify" something concerning what their opponent said during the last question. Usually they would begin such a response by saying "with all due respect," then proceed with a litany of statistics. After a while, this became tiresome to watch.

Another distracting aspect, specifically in the last "town hall" debate, was the terrible camerawork. I know this was probably a difficult event to televise because the candidates kept leaving their podiums, but it was bothersome nonetheless. Another problem was the split screen used several times, I assume, to show the candidate's reaction to the other's statements. If the hope was to catch one of them in a scowl caused by something the other person said, the split screen failed (they had their poker faces on). About the only thing it did do was provide a comparison of how the two candidates drank their water (a criteria that, I'm sure, someone will use to make their choice on Election Day).

And last but certainly not least on the list of debate "pains in the posterior" is the endless parade of political pundits who appear after the debate to tell us who "won" and enlighten us with their brilliant analysis. By the time Sam, Cokie and the rest are through telling us what we think about what we just saw, you're about ready to chuck the TV out the window.

Given all of these distractions, however, I think these debates highlighted some larger and more important problems with our democracy. The medium of television is proving to be both a blessing and a curse for our republic. While it has given us greater access and insight into the workings of our government (with C-SPAN, CNN, and the like), it has also reduced our politics into a never-ending stream of ten second soundbites capable of comprehension by a public whose attention span has been diminished, by television, to the equivalent of a 2-year-old's. Television is the primary culprit for the most important reason people didn't watch these debates -- they weren't really debates. Television, which places every minute aspect of the candidates under the microscope in front of millions, compels candidates to choose the safest route -- to minimize all possibility of risk. This is what leads to idiocies like the rule (agreed to by both campaigns) that the candidates could not directly address questions to each other. How is it possible to have any compelling give and take between the candidates when everything must be filtered through a moderator? Eliminating this rule, while perhaps creating more chances for the candidates to make a slip, would have almost certainly led to more interesting debates and thus, more viewers.

Another problem with televised debates is that instead of having in-depth, intelligent discussion of issues, the format (and the previously mentioned short attention span that television has created) leads the candidates to spend more effort trying to produce the most memorable one liner that will be repeated over and over on television and in the papers the following day (such as Reagan's "Well, there you go again" to Jimmy Carter in 1980; or Lloyd Bentsen's "You're no Jack Kennedy" line to Dan Quayle in 1988). The Lincoln -- Douglas debates, they certainly are not.

It is a good thing that televised debates are a recent addition to our political landscape. Think of all the good presidents we might have lost because of the premium television places on style over substance. Imagine the well-polished television persona of Bill Clinton matched up with, for instance, a gangly, awkwardly tall lawyer with a shrill tenor voice heavy with Kentucky accent, hailing from Illinois -- Abraham Lincoln; or against a stern fellow (he looked like he had "been weaned on a pickle") who stated such profundities as "the business of America is business," but nevertheless presided over a decade of great prosperity -- Calvin Coolidge. Clinton would have routed either one of them on televison -- a chilling thought, indeed.

Unfortunately, televised debates are now just one part of a larger process for electing presidents that encourages qualities (such as obsession with obtaining the office, willingness to beg for and accept money from anyone, and emphasis on style over substance) that are diametrically opposed to the qualities required for good leadership. Bill Clinton has mastered the former qualities well, and a return to the Oval Office on November 5th will most likely be the result.