Bush as Debater

THE three Republican presidential debates—the first involving all contestants-—were a lesson in the tight radius of political cycles. After Debates 1 and 2, in Manchester, N.H., and Phoenix, Ariz., George W. Bush was being written off for his listless, lockjawed performances. Some of this was spin by the McCain press office (a/k/a the media). The New York Times, for example, subtly but significantly edited Bush’s answers to make them appear even weaker than they were. Still, they were weak enough. But after Debate 3 in Des Moines, Iowa, Bush was back on top of the GOP world. Questions about his personality and his conservatism remain, but they are the old questions, not new ones. As an easygoing druggie in my college singing group used to say, whenever disaster loomed, “There’s still time to panic.”

The television-era political debate is an odd format. Forget the Constitutional Convention, or Lincoln-Douglas. Each candidate gets a haiku-sized slot, in which he dumps appropriate lines from his stump speech (the short-windedness of modern oratory neatly tracks the constrictions of the debate format). The encounters are presided over by those modern arbiters, the pundits, who are often smug and obtuse. Actual citizen questioners are always worse (remember Mr. Ponytail, in Clinton-Bush ’92?), which is not surprising, since preliminary vetting tends to leave the kind of person who makes himself obnoxious at PTA meetings. The format has degenerated over time: Joe McGinnis’s Selling of the President, 1968 held up to our scorn the Nixon campaign’s Q&A sessions with “representative” voters, though compared with today’s debates, they look like Platonic dialogues. Think, finally, of leaders commonly thought to be adequate who would flunk the debate test—Jefferson, shy and conflict-phobic; mumbling James Madison; the Adamses, arrogant and irritable. By the same token, Bill Clinton is a rather good debater.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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THE three Republican presidential debates—the first involving all contestants-—were a lesson in the tight radius of political cycles. After Debates 1 and 2, in Manchester, N.H., and Phoenix, Ariz., George W. Bush was being written off for his listless, lockjawed performances. Some of this was spin by the McCain press office (a/k/a the media). The New York Times, for example, subtly but significantly edited Bush’s answers to make them appear even weaker than they were. Still, they were weak enough. But after Debate 3 in Des Moines, Iowa, Bush was back on top of the GOP world. Questions about his personality and his conservatism remain, but they are the old questions, not new ones. As an easygoing druggie in my college singing group used to say, whenever disaster loomed, “There’s still time to panic.”

The television-era political debate is an odd format. Forget the Constitutional Convention, or Lincoln-Douglas. Each candidate gets a haiku-sized slot, in which he dumps appropriate lines from his stump speech (the short-windedness of modern oratory neatly tracks the constrictions of the debate format). The encounters are presided over by those modern arbiters, the pundits, who are often smug and obtuse. Actual citizen questioners are always worse (remember Mr. Ponytail, in Clinton-Bush ’92?), which is not surprising, since preliminary vetting tends to leave the kind of person who makes himself obnoxious at PTA meetings. The format has degenerated over time: Joe McGinnis’s Selling of the President, 1968 held up to our scorn the Nixon campaign’s Q&A sessions with “representative” voters, though compared with today’s debates, they look like Platonic dialogues. Think, finally, of leaders commonly thought to be adequate who would flunk the debate test—Jefferson, shy and conflict-phobic; mumbling James Madison; the Adamses, arrogant and irritable. By the same token, Bill Clinton is a rather good debater.