The Debate Debate

To understand the controversy over the presidential debates this election year, one need only return to one of the debates held in 1988. More than a few observers are convinced that this is where George Bush won his campaign against Michael S. Dukakis.

Already wounded by "Willie Horton" and other so-called family value issues, Dukakis found himself mortally wounded by a question from Cable News Network anchor Bernard Shaw.

"Governor," Shaw asked, "if Kitty Dukakis was raped and murdered, would you change your opposition to capital punishment?"

Dukakis' cold, white-paper answer, to many, confirmed the Republican charge that he was too out of step with the electorate for the presidency.

Not only did many Republicans think Dukakis finished himself with that answer, but more than a few Democrats thought so as well. Bernard Shaw has told me often that, for months following the debate, a number of Democratic activists were livid with him, and that some accused him of being a Republican ringer in the debate.

In truth, it wasn't Shaw's question that did Dukakis in. The question, in many ways, was a softball. The coup de grace was Dukakis' cold fish response.

Having been softened up by weeks of negative GOP advertising on everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to crime, Dukakis was overly ripe for the surgical question that would expose a weakness on one of those fronts.

Bush-Quayle campaign officials, led by Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, are in the process of tenderizing Gov. Bill Clinton over the draft and tax-and-spend issues. The plan, it seems, is to muck him up so much that some reporter--rather than a more professorial, single moderator--will cut him to the quick, either with some alleged new information or stylistically, as was done with Dukakis.

Baker et al can be certain that some reporter would do this because of long and close experience with the Washington press corps. Many reporters operate differently before, say, a background briefing by some senior official than they do at high-profile, live news events. For example, the behavior of reporters at a live White House press conference--especially the prime time, East room king--is exponentially different from their behavior at the daily, off-camera White House briefings.

Part of the reason for this is that more than a few reporters have won lucrative network news jobs on the basis of questions asked at such events. So the well-timed and properly phrased question can be worth literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. On such events, careers have been launched.

Another reason is that, on live TV, in front of God and everybody, reporters, like most people, want to be seen as good at their work. So, often, they overreach.

All of which leads us to the question of press participation in the electoral process. By the time the presidential campaign gets to the fall debates between the two major parties, reporters have outlived their usefulness, it seems to me. What voters want and are entitled to know is where the two candidates stand and how they stack up against each other. In this, reporters only get in the way.

That is why the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates has it exactly right in recommending that debates be held with a single moderator. Having failed thus far to close the gap on Clinton, the president may decide that it's in his own best interest to debate Clinton--even without reporters.

Nonetheless, major news organizations can go a long way toward repairing their sorry election coverage reputations by forbidding their reporters from participation in the debates.

The American people might actually learn something this time.

Kenneth R. Walker, an independent television producer and columnist, is a fellow at the Institute of Politics.