Evolution of a 'Great Idea'

...I was invited to the lunch, not in a restaurant but at a very snooty club on the East Side of Manhattan, the kind of place where you dare not speak too loud...

...Nixon did not like our answer...

...He made appropriate noises about the Lincoln-Douglas debates and our duty to inform the electorate...

...In the 2004 campaign, the admittedly rigid rules negotiated by the contenders' representatives notwithstanding, it was the only occasion for them to rise above the muck of the TV-commercial culture...

...Eventually, the major parties stepped into the breach...

...The ad man went away...

...I stared at him smugly—I didn't really like him—and explained that what he proposed would be against the law...

...Not only that, but he had a big client lined up—one of the automobile companies, as I recall—who would pay full sponsorship...

...What the Democratic nominee advocated seemed to him too close to the regulated society he left behind...

...The one thing left to do will be to amend the Constitution accordingly...

...When I got home, a week or so later, I learned that those watching on television had given the victory to Kennedy...

...Now the wannabes stick it out for at least a few free TV appearances...

...Nixon, his manner aloof and withdrawn, was having none of that...

...All he wanted was the answer to one question: If debates occurred, would George Wallace, the populist former governor of Alabama running on a segregationist platform, be included...

...Transmitting what they know, or think they know, unmediated by any editorial process, they claim a purity of soul different from that of professionals who are paid to provide news...

...According to the Federal Communications Act, we could not hold such a debate unless we included every official candidate for the Presidency: the Prohibition candidate, the Socialist Workers candidate, the Natural Law candidate, and the rest of the various standard bearers...

...Historians for the most part agree that Kennedy's beating Nixon in the four 1960 Presidential debates was a major factor in his winning the election...

...But some bloggers gained access to exit-polling data early on Election Day afternoon and, lacking the skills and discipline to interpret them, let it out that Kerry had won...

...This would have made for an effective anecdote had Nixon and Humphrey debated that year...

...In the wake of the first debate, the challenger's poll numbers jumped to the level they sustained up to the election...

...A legacy of the 2004 election is that there must be Presidential debates...

...Candidates will set up light housekeeping in one of the undecided states and shuttle to the others for the remaining days of the campaign...

...If someone, or some organization, decided to stage a debate, and afterward a television news organization decided to send its cameras to cover the event as news, the resulting TV program would fall under the rubric of legitimate news coverage...

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...No further commercials will be purchased on TV stations in the other states, and Americans in those states who want to learn about the choice for President will perforce be satisfied with TV reports and newspaper stories of the candidates' speeches, fish fries, town hall meetings, and Main Street strolls...

...They featured no end to arithmetical gibberish, juggling putative electoral vote numbers...

...After the second debate, held in NBC's Washington studio, the scuttlebutt was that Robert F. Kennedy, his brother's campaign manager, had arrived early in the day and complained loudly that the studio was too cold...

...Nor was there any point in throwing money away on TV commercials in those states...

...He insisted it be warmer, presumably so we could see Nixon sweating again...

...He was handsome besides, as well as forceful and cheerful in the way he spoke...

...It was a mixed success, yet there had been no debates for 16 years, so it was progress...

...Bush and the field marshal of the Bush forces in Florida during the 2000 dispute, they insisted before the debate commission that podiums be of equal height and spaced 10 feet apart (to obscure Kerry's 5-inch height advantage), that the candidates not directly ask questions of each other, and that neither of them step into the "space" of the other, as Vice President Al Gore had infringed upon George W Bush during one of the 2000 debates...

...All political journalism in the other states will then cease...

...McAndrew, one of those rare creatures actually born in Washington, D.C., anticipated a couple of hours of delicious political gossip, later to be shared with friends and colleagues—and, if worthy...

...In 1976, the League of Women Voters stepped forward to sponsor the Presidential debates...

...There were no debates in 1968...

...But because of the law there had to be...

...Vice President Richard M. Nixon was, of course, sure to be the Republicans' nominee...

...For weeks, opinion polls had shown only minor deviations from a dead heat...

...I have spoken to people who had official positions in the studio at the time and they say nothing like that happened, but the rumor has persisted...

...Without it, whenever a mayor running for re-election snipped a ribbon, the candidates of the Natural Law and Agrarian Virtue parties would have to be allotted "equal time...

...Kennedy poured it on and won...

...We said that Wallace was an officially recognized candidate with a substantial following, and unless Congress phrased its amendment to the Communications Act in a special way, it was hard to see how he could be excluded...

...A commission on debates was set up, headed by former chairmen of the two parties and sporting a little bureaucracy of its own, and every quadrennium it issues a call for debates...

...In the run-up to November 2, the coterie of political managers—focus group coordinators and others of that relatively new and dubious breed of election specialists—steadily narrowed their attention to the "battleground" states, the "doubtful" states, and the dozen or so "swing" states where the election would be decided...

...That fact did not stop California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from publicly recalling this past August at the Republican National Convention how— just after he landed in the U.S...

...He had become real...

...It remains acceptable small talk to scoff that they are not debates at all, and to bring up Robert's Rules of Order, the Oxford Union, and, naturally, the Lincoln-Douglas debates...

...The pattern augurs a Sanhédrin of pollsters that, as some future election approaches, will decree only seven or nine or four of the states are in contention and how they vote will determine which candidate gains the Electoral College majority...

...Some long shots, reluctant to give up the opportunity to tell the nation what will save it, stay in the race until the primaries themselves are over...

...After the two major parties nominated their candidates for President, he went on, we should have them debate on prime time network television...

...Some of Kerry's were no better, but the President had the benefit of already being known to all Americans...

...In any event, freelance blogging suffered a serious black eye, even among its own...

...Someone will suggest, only half in jest, that the citizens of those states alone need vote...

...This year's Democratic primary debates made national figures of Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, the Reverend Al Sharpton and former Illinois Senator Carole Mosley-Braun...

...It is a mystery why he agreed to debates once the creaking machinery of Congress had been coaxed into temporarily amending the Communications Act to permit them...

...Incidentally, the famed 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas took place during a race not for President but for an Illinois Senate seat...

...The Massachusetts challenger was not nearly as well known as Nixon, and televised debates would surely do wonders for his public recognition...

...The networks, after the fiasco of 2000 when they moved too fast to call a very tight race, made much of behaving themselves this time around...

...Though they have been conducted before each of the last eight Presidential elections, their reputation has not been spotless...

...leaked to a favorite reporter...

...from his native Austria—he watched Nixon debate the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, during the 1968 campaign...

...Nixon's Republican positions attracted him...

...The last weeks of news coverage of the campaign were about Ohio and Michigan and New Mexico and the rest...

...He could easily have nudged his old friends in Congress to again revise the Communications Act, but he didn't...

...The results certainly were so close that they could have made the difference...

...Presidential debates are a different story...

...Though Kennedy had not yet locked up the nomination, his campaign's insiders must have sensed that if the debates could be arranged they would affect their audience like a morality play...

...Think ofwhat it would do for your budget," he said with a smirk...

...Any candidate refusing to take part would demean himself before his supporters...

...Early in 1968, NBC's White House correspondent called the president of NBC News, Bill McAndrew, with word that former Vice President Nixon had proposed flying to New York to meet him for lunch...

...Four years later, in the wake of Kennedy's assassination, there was no way that President Lyndon B. Johnson would let Republican candidate Barry Goldwater share national television with him...

...Nixon looked bad: He was ill, he had a fever, and he sweated...

...It was, he said, what made him, the penniless immigrant boy, a Republican...

...But some ideas have their moment, and there is no stopping them...

...And we would hear little or nothing about them after Kennedy was elected...

...The Bush team had gone to great lengths to give their candidate the advantage—or more correctly, to mitigate what they anticipated would be his disadvantages in one-on-one with Kerry...

...I caught some of it on BBC Radio—long past midnight— and thought Nixon had clearly run awav with it...

...There were no debates that year—and no free prime time for Goldwater...

...Everything centered on the swing states and the electoral votes they would yield...

...I was working on a documentary that month, and on the evening of the first debate I was in London...

...This is an old and established exception to the equal-time and fairness rules...

...There are presumably ways of construing this as an achievement...

...As for content, all I can remember is a lot of talk about two islands off the coast of mainland China, Quemoy and Matsu, which I, like most Americans, had never heard of...

...A second legacy may be the discrediting of bloggers, those self-appointed sentinels of news, each with his own self-designed Web site...

...Following much palaver, a consensus grew around a kind of subterfuge...

...For the network news organizations, the national newspapers and even the wire services, all other states fell off the radar...

...Perhaps they learned it is not as easy as it looks...

...Certain states, according to those polls, were so committed to one side or the other that there seemed no use in polling them further...

...On Television Evolution of a 'Great Idea' By Reuven Frank Early IN 1960, an advertising agency guy I knew casually breezed into my office at NBC News, where I was then a producer, and announced that he had a great idea...

...Led by James A. Baker, secretary of state under President George H.W...

...Indeed the format, flawed as it may be, has been extended to the Presidential primaries, albeit with less salutary results...

...But claiming that the face-offs of the major candidates are not really debates is as true, and as pointless, as insisting the year 2000 was not the first of the new millennium...

...But if anyone in the President's camp thought their man would gain the most from not debating at all, he did not have the temerity to say so...

...There may be another, less encouraging, legacy of this year's election...

...The public's taste for Presidential debates was whetted in 1960...

...By 1960, television had grown up enough, become enough of a part of American life, that even the long noses accepted it as an important source of public information...

...Televising debates between the major candidates seemed so obvious a step that it is surprising there was even any discussion...

...For the party out of power invariably has an unreasonable number of hopefuls who used to be winnowed away rapidly by obvious unpopularity or a shortage of funds...

...The public got to see and hear Senator John Kerry removed from the cheap theatrics of his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, and insulated from the (successful) doubt-casting and name-calling of his opponent's negative commercials...

...There is no sorting out who first decided to seriously push the issue, but I suspect someone in Senator John F. Kennedy's considerable brain trust thought it would work to his advantage...

...But no one had figured out how to satisfy it on a permanent basis while maintaining the protective provisions of the law...