Presidential Debates Key to US Politics, Panelists Say

The presidential debates have become a signature event in American life, joining state of the union messages and inaugural addresses as one of the few galvanizing civic occasions of the nation, panelists marking the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy-Nixon debates told host Marvin Kalb Sept. 21.

“With all of the options for news and information today, the national audience has become disaggregated, said Mike McCurry, former Clinton press secretary who is now co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates. “The presidential debates allow the candidates to bring the nation back together again.”

Bob Schieffer, chief Washington correspondent for CBS News, said, “most people make up if minds on presidential candidates from television advertising. The only thing that can counter that is the debates.”

Coming at the end of the presidential campaign, he said, the debates signal to Americans voters that “it is time to start paying attention to the campaign.”

The Internet has become “the ultimate multiplier” in the educational value of the debates, said Janet Brown, executive director of the Commission on Presidential Debates. While the debates still are mostly a television event, the Internet allows anyone to look at them from different angles and to comment on them for anyone they can reach.

At the beginning of this edition of The Kalb Report, a clip of the Kennedy-Nixon debate played on the screen behind the panelists. It showed a younger Sander Vanocur, who as an NBC television correspondent was one of the journalists questioning Richard Nixon and John Kennedy.

On the screen the young Vanocur turned around and appeared to look at the older version on the dais, who said that at the time he had little idea of the significance of the event.

“When it was over, the place cleared out in about 15 minutes,” he said. “There were no handlers. We didn’t know what we were involved in.”

Said Schieffer, “we didn’t know about the power of television when this debate was held.”

After the Kennedy-Nixon match, no debates were held for 16 years until the fractious 1976 campaign between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter – when neither candidate had a clear lead – made debates palatable to both candidates.

But not until the Commission on Presidential Debates was created in 1987 did the question in each presidential campaign shift from whether debates would be held to how they would be structured, Brown said. After that, no one doubted that every presidential election would include debates.

Many formats have been tried since then, the panelists said, but the one that seems to work best has one television journalist as the moderator who acts mostly as a referee to allow the candidates to talk with a minimum of interference.

Schieffer said he thought the 2008 debate where he was the moderator had the best format. It was a small table with both candidates and the moderator. The moderator would throw out a question, and the candidates had five minutes to talk about it.

"I didn’t do much,” Schieffer said. “I just posed the question and made sure they kept on track.”

-- Gil Klein, [email protected]