[Mb-civic] Bush considers cancelling Town Hall-Style Debate

[Kevin Walz]

  Bush Debates Cancelling Town Hall
  By Paul Waldman, Gadflyer. Posted September 20, 2004.
http://www.alternet.org/election04/19931/

  According to recent news reports, the Bush campaign is attempting to 
reduce the number of debates the President has with John Kerry from the 
three proposed by the Commission on Presidential Debates to only two. 
More specifically, they are attempting to eliminate the town hall style 
debate scheduled for October 8 in St. Louis.

  Let us put aside the strong possibility that the Bush team's 
negotiating position has been constructed with an eye toward convincing 
reporters that Bush is afraid to debate Kerry, thus lowering 
expectations for the president and raising them for Kerry. If there is 
one debate that the president would rather skip, it's the town hall, 
because it calls Bush to do the things he is least capable of: 
responding to unpredictable questions, talking about a wide range of 
issues, and addressing the day-to-day concerns of real people. And it 
would be a shame, because the town hall is far and away the most 
entertaining and edifying format.

  The town hall debate originated in 1992, when with the assistance of 
Gallup the Commission on Presidential Debates gathered a group of 
undecided voters in Richmond, Va. to quiz George H.W. Bush, Bill 
Clinton, and Ross Perot about their positions and personalities. The 
format was perfectly suited to Bill Clinton's skills; he understood 
that viewers at home could connect with him by watching him connect 
with ordinary people. In what would become the debate's signature 
moment, President Bush found himself unable to answer a voter's 
question about how the national debt had affected him personally. 
Staying close to his podium, Bush struggled to figure out what she 
meant, finally saying with an awkward smile, "I'm not sure I get - help 
me with the question and I'll try to answer it." When it came time for 
Clinton to rebut, he walked over to the woman, looked in her eyes, and 
said, "Tell me how it's affected you." The election was effectively 
over.

  But apart from what it revealed about the candidates, the Richmond 
debate - and the similar ones held in 1996 and 2000 - proved themselves 
to be the best thing the Commission could offer voters, for a few 
reasons.

Power to the People

First, it turned out that ordinary citizens ask much better questions 
than journalists. The pre-1992 format, in which a panel of journalists 
would question the candidate, was dominated by efforts to play "gotcha" 
- with their brief moment on the national stage, reporters often asked 
candidates questions of the "Have you stopped beating your wife?" 
variety in hopes of creating a compelling slip-up. They also focused on 
process, with questions about campaign strategy and tactics.

  But the voters assembled for the town hall debates have done nothing 
of the sort. To a fault, their questions have been substantive and 
practical, focusing on issues and asking candidates to elaborate their 
positions and specify what actions they will take as president.

  For Bush, this presents a problem: it's one thing to brush off a 
reporter with yet another recitation of a talking point ("We're 
safer... Saddam was a threat... we're turning the corner..."), since 
most voters think reporters are cynics just trying to get the 
candidates to slip up. But doing the same thing to a voter asking for 
some real answers doesn't make you look clever, it makes you look rude. 
Bush knows how to stay "on message" as well as any president in 
history, a talent that serves him well in many situations. But a 
town-hall debate isn't one of them.

  The second distinction of town hall debates is that citizen 
questioners tend to cover much greater ground than journalist 
questioners. While reporters - who travel and think in a giant pack 
most of the time - tend to focus on the few issues that are dominating 
the campaign, citizens have brought concerns to the town-hall debate 
that a Washington journalist might never have thought of. For instance, 
in the 2000 town hall debate, Bush and Gore fielded questions about 
national health insurance, FDA procedures for approving new drugs, 
education, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, military overstretch, the 
Brady Law, family farms, low turnout among young people, taxes, 
affirmative action and the death penalty. Both campaigns can predict 
fairly accurately what questions a journalist will ask them. But you 
can never tell what an ordinary citizen is going to bring up.

  And this too is a problem for President Bush. To put it charitably, 
his facility with the details of the myriad policy issues a president 
confronts has its limits. The citizen questioners bring an 
unpredictability to debates that plays right to Bush's weakness. As 
we've seen time and again, when Bush is forced to think on his feet the 
results range from the comical to the embarrassing. While some issues 
may allow him to fall back on tried-and-true sound bites even if he 
doesn't really know what he's talking about, the chances Bush will be 
thrown a curve ball - and come out looking silly - are fairly high.

  There may be another reason Bush doesn't want a town hall debate: the 
one in 2000 was his worst performance by far. Although the press didn't 
interpret it this way at the time, there may not have been a debate 
since the Bentsen-Quayle matchup in 1988 in which one candidate so 
clearly outclassed his opponent. Bush came across as uninformed, 
confused, and at times even self-parodying. He repeatedly said the 
opposite of what he meant - "If I'm the president, we're going to have 
emergency room care, we're going have gag orders... I'm not so sure 80% 
of the people get the death tax. I know this, 100% will get it if I'm 
the president." Asked by an audience member "How will your tax 
proposals affect me as a middle-class, 34-year-old single person with 
no dependents?" Bush gave an answer about Medicare. Answering a 
question about health care, he said, "Insurance, that's a Washington 
term." When Gore interrupted him in one back-and-forth exchange, Bush 
said petulantly, "There are certain rules in this that we all agree to, 
but evidently rules don't mean anything."

  In part as practice for a town hall debate, President Bush has been 
conducting town-hall meetings as he campaigns across the country. But 
these events, like all Bush appearances, are carefully restricted lest 
anyone who doesn't support Bush slip through. The assembled supporters 
are given the opportunity to speak to the President, but they're as 
likely to heap praise on him as ask a question; one said, "Mr. 
President, I don't have a question, I have three thank-yous. One, thank 
you for your availability to serve. Two, your candle is burning 
brightly. And three, thanks for accepting the call and answering the 
call to work for what's right in the country and in the world." Not 
exactly hard-hitting - and nothing that would help him prepare for a 
real town-hall debate.

  Rather than risk a repeat of his 2000 town hall performance, Bush is 
apparently trying to eliminate the town hall debate altogether. His 
representatives have said that their concern is that Kerry partisans 
could infiltrate the debate. But they're probably just as worried that 
Bush might encounter an actual undecided voter.

  Bush is at his best in front of an adoring crowd, where he can lean 
forward, look resolute and deliver declarations he's repeated dozens of 
times before, safe in the knowledge they'll be greeted with thunderous 
applause. But in a town-hall debate, applause lines are greeted with a 
skeptical silence and evasion can prove costly. Bush's strengths will 
be of little use, and his weaknesses will be cast in high relief.

  When Larry King asked Bush whether he runs into undecided voters on 
the campaign trail, Bush responded candidly, "The president generally 
doesn't run into anybody." That could be his biggest problem - and why 
he's afraid of whom he'd run into if he showed up in St. Louis.

Paul Waldman is the Editor-in-Chief of The Gadflyer and author of 
'Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why The Media Didn't Tell 
You.'



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