Bush as Debater: A critique - George W. Bush

National Review, Dec 31, 1999 by Richard Brookhiser

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.

Debates do serve useful functions, however. They give exposure to the candidates' ideas in a format more neutral than their own ads. They put the candidates on screen in a somewhat uncontrolled situation, thus allowing voters to get a sense of their personalities. They allow the adroit candidate to make the occasional good point-Ronald Reagan's "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" in 1980-or clever dig- George Bush calling Pete du Pont "Pierre" in 1988 (translation: He's the rich prepster, not me). Never mind that these moments are all scripted-so is almost everything presidents do in office. Debates also allow candidates to shoot themselves in the foot, e.g., Gerald Ford liberating Poland in 1976.

Each of the six candidates came into these debates with a distinct mission. Orrin Hatch and Alan Keyes had to distinguish themselves, and both succeeded, in different ways. Hatch, with the manner of a kindly old turtle in a children's book, came across as the most relaxed and well-informed candidate. His is a nice version of the senatorial personality-secure in his status and used to holding forth. In a big hall, like the auditorium in Phoenix, you can feel Alan Keyes feel the echo. His energy flows, he starts his little quiver on the balls of his feet, his personality unfolds and fills the stage like some great flower. This is a bad thing.

Steve Forbes and Gary Bauer fought it out in the conservative sub- primary. Both brought up favorite themes capably-Forbes scolded Alan Greenspan and the IMF, Bauer bashed China and repeated a good line about religion in schools (Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris gave the Nazi salute to each other in Columbine H.S. with impunity, yet the Ten Commandments cannot be posted). But victories in segments of the market are fruitless, since the point is to win the whole thing.

John McCain's job was to rake in press plaudits. He would have accomplished this goal if he had shown up in a cardboard box, like a homeless person. He did better than that, though not as much better as he was given credit for (see below).

And George W. had the job of underscoring his dominance over the field. He managed to do that only in the last debate, but one third of a loaf was as good as a whole one. Those are the benefits of dominance.

In the first two debates George W. was constricted and curt. He was not nervous, exactly, and if you looked for it, you could see the executive's air of command-something none of the other candidates had. But he closed off his answers too soon; worse, he seemed unaware that debates require engagement with the other candidates, and with the audience. He recalled the callow nobleman in Cyrano de Bergerac who calls the hero's nose "large," which elicits from Cyrano a three-page catalogue of all the things he could have called Cyrano's shnoz, at the end of which Cyrano kills him. Bush made an easily avoidable mistake by claiming to be reading a biography of Dean Acheson, and then defining the Acheson/Marshall vision in only the vaguest terms. McCain scrambled in to make a specific remark about Acheson, which the press treated as if he had delivered Webster's reply to Hayne. All McCain actually proved was that he knew Acheson's career had intersected with the Korean War; an interesting thing to know about Acheson would have been that he started the Korean War, with a disastrous speech about our Asian defensive perimeter. But journalists are easily satisfied, and Bush had left himself open to the blow.