US election diary: Time to talk
By Rob Reynolds, Al Jazeera s senior Washington correspondent - Ghanaian Chronicle International | Fri, 26 Sep 2008
| 
 To endure no pain is to be dead. But as along as we live, pain will live with us. Pain and suffering are for the living, not the dead. We must therefore, learn to live with our pains and suffering and move on life to ensure a better future for ourselves. - By: Dora Abankwah  |
“After last night's debate, the reputation of Messieurs Lincoln and Douglas is secure.” Edward R Murrow, journalist, after listening to the Kennedy-Nixon debate, September 26, 1960. The first US presidential debates of the televison age proved how the new medium favoured image over substance.
What John F Kennedy, then a Democrat senator and Richard Nixon, the Republican vice-president, talked about in 1960 including an obscure discussion of Quemoy and Matsu, two tiny islands in the straits of Taiwan - has been mostly forgotten.
What is remembered is how they looked: Kennedy, fresh from a campaign swing through California, was tanned, relaxed and charismatic; Nixon, recovering from knee surgery, was haggard, nervous and sweaty.
Audience surveys showed most viewers believed Kennedy won the debate decisively.
He scored a narrow victory on election day itself - and television became a dominant force in US elections.
“Up until that point politics had been conducted behind closed doors and in the print medium,” says Alan Schroeder, a professor of journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.
Schroeder, the author of Presidential Debates: 40 Years of High-Risk TV, says after 1960, politics “became a television programme. And we really never have moved away from that. The thing that happened in 1960 established politics as a television show and it continues to this very day.”
Out of touch
In 1976, Gerald Ford, the Republican president, was rising in the polls against Jimmy Carter until he blundered in his response to a foreign policy question, declaring emphatically: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
Ford later explained that he meant to say his administration would never concede Soviet domination of the region, but voters thought Ford was out of touch and confused; they showed him the door a month later.
In 1980, Carter was on the defensive and Ronald Reagan, the Republican challenger, posed viewers of their debate a devastatingly direct question: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
This was in the midst of a recession, a petrol shortage, and the Tehran US embassy hostage crisis, when fighters held US diplomats for over a year in support of the Iranian revolution.
Voters concluded that they would be better off without Carter.
Four years later, Reagan rambled and stumbled in his first face-off with Walter Mondale - raising questions about whether the 73-year-old president was becoming addled with age.
But Reagan regained ground in the second debate, with a well-rehearsed line flipping the age issue on its head: “I refuse to exploit for political purposes,” Reagan declared, “my opponent's youth and inexperience.”
The line brought down the house. Mondale won exactly one state and the District of Columbia that year — one of the worst wipeouts in US political history.
Emotion counts
1988 featured an exceptionally nasty campaign, and one in which debates played a key role in the face-off between George HW Bush and Michael Dukakis, the Democrat candidate.
Dukakis shocked viewers with his dispassionate answer to an emotionally-loaded question that mentioned Dukakis's wife, Kitty.
The death penalty was a major topic in that year's campaign, with Bush gung-ho in favour of executions and Dukakis opposed to them.
In addition, Dukakis had a reputation for an almost robotic personality - something of a cold fish without human emotions.
Bernard Shaw of CNN, the debate's moderator, asked Dukakis, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favour an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”
Dukakis answered immediately, “No, I don't, Bernard, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life.”
He went on with a wonkish digression about the war on drug abuse. “What was so surprising was how quickly Dukakis answered,” Shaw told me in a conversation at his Washington DC home recently.
“He began talking almost before I'd finished asking the question. That showed me he really hadn't listened to it carefully.”
In the press room, reporters who heard Dukakis' reply said to one another, “That's it for him; he's lost it.”
And indeed, Dukakis lost to Bush in a landslide victory a few weeks later.
Shaw said he suffered a lot of criticism for his question, but believes to this day it was an appropriate way to try to pierce the well-rehearsed answers that politicians often give when asked about controversial matters.
After all, it was Dukakis's answer — not Shaw's question — that torpedoed the Massachusetts governor's candidacy. Memorable put-downs
1988 also saw the best put down of any debate. Continued
What John F Kennedy, then a Democrat senator and Richard Nixon, the Republican vice-president, talked about in 1960 including an obscure discussion of Quemoy and Matsu, two tiny islands in the straits of Taiwan - has been mostly forgotten.
What is remembered is how they looked: Kennedy, fresh from a campaign swing through California, was tanned, relaxed and charismatic; Nixon, recovering from knee surgery, was haggard, nervous and sweaty.
Audience surveys showed most viewers believed Kennedy won the debate decisively.
He scored a narrow victory on election day itself - and television became a dominant force in US elections.
“Up until that point politics had been conducted behind closed doors and in the print medium,” says Alan Schroeder, a professor of journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.
Schroeder, the author of Presidential Debates: 40 Years of High-Risk TV, says after 1960, politics “became a television programme. And we really never have moved away from that. The thing that happened in 1960 established politics as a television show and it continues to this very day.”
Out of touch
In 1976, Gerald Ford, the Republican president, was rising in the polls against Jimmy Carter until he blundered in his response to a foreign policy question, declaring emphatically: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
Ford later explained that he meant to say his administration would never concede Soviet domination of the region, but voters thought Ford was out of touch and confused; they showed him the door a month later.
In 1980, Carter was on the defensive and Ronald Reagan, the Republican challenger, posed viewers of their debate a devastatingly direct question: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
This was in the midst of a recession, a petrol shortage, and the Tehran US embassy hostage crisis, when fighters held US diplomats for over a year in support of the Iranian revolution.
Voters concluded that they would be better off without Carter.
Four years later, Reagan rambled and stumbled in his first face-off with Walter Mondale - raising questions about whether the 73-year-old president was becoming addled with age.
But Reagan regained ground in the second debate, with a well-rehearsed line flipping the age issue on its head: “I refuse to exploit for political purposes,” Reagan declared, “my opponent's youth and inexperience.”
The line brought down the house. Mondale won exactly one state and the District of Columbia that year — one of the worst wipeouts in US political history.
Emotion counts
1988 featured an exceptionally nasty campaign, and one in which debates played a key role in the face-off between George HW Bush and Michael Dukakis, the Democrat candidate.
Dukakis shocked viewers with his dispassionate answer to an emotionally-loaded question that mentioned Dukakis's wife, Kitty.
The death penalty was a major topic in that year's campaign, with Bush gung-ho in favour of executions and Dukakis opposed to them.
In addition, Dukakis had a reputation for an almost robotic personality - something of a cold fish without human emotions.
Bernard Shaw of CNN, the debate's moderator, asked Dukakis, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favour an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”
Dukakis answered immediately, “No, I don't, Bernard, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life.”
He went on with a wonkish digression about the war on drug abuse. “What was so surprising was how quickly Dukakis answered,” Shaw told me in a conversation at his Washington DC home recently.
“He began talking almost before I'd finished asking the question. That showed me he really hadn't listened to it carefully.”
In the press room, reporters who heard Dukakis' reply said to one another, “That's it for him; he's lost it.”
And indeed, Dukakis lost to Bush in a landslide victory a few weeks later.
Shaw said he suffered a lot of criticism for his question, but believes to this day it was an appropriate way to try to pierce the well-rehearsed answers that politicians often give when asked about controversial matters.
After all, it was Dukakis's answer — not Shaw's question — that torpedoed the Massachusetts governor's candidacy. Memorable put-downs
1988 also saw the best put down of any debate. Continued
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