by From Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates
More is bound to come out someday from the participants—in various memoirs, if not before.
There is also sure to be punditry galore forever about the Cool versus Edge choice of 2008. Less than two years into the Obama presidency there was already much talk about whether Obama had turned out to be too cool. Some of his political friends were even advising him openly to show more edge.
The Commission on Presidential Debates took another major step toward full autonomy in 2008—at least, as it involves the selection of moderators. The three besides me were Schieffer of CBS, Tom Brokaw of NBC, and Gwen Ifill of PBS.
The McCain and Obama campaigns were not told the four names until shortly before they were announced to the press by Janet Brown and the commission cochairs, Paul Kirk and Frank Fahrenkopf.
It had been twenty-four years since the opening of the first 1984 Reagan-Mondale debate at Louisville, Kentucky, when Barbara Walters lodged her very public complaint about the campaigns’ power to veto moderators and panelists.
Kirk and Fahrenkopf, along with Janet Brown, are given much credit for the slow but sure move toward building the commission’s independence. As former national party chairmen—Kirk, the Democrat, and Fahrenkopf, the Republican—they established a thin but firm line between representing the competing interests of their own parties’ campaigns and of the commission. As politicians, they also knew about compromise.
All four 2008 moderators drew criticism for our respective labors. Whatever their merits, the accessibility of email and other rapid response electronics made critiques more plentiful than ever.
Most of mine were about the “stupid,” “obsessive,” or “school principal” manner in which I tried to get Obama and McCain to interact.
Guilty as charged.
Tom Brokaw moderated the McCain-Obama town hall debate on October 7, 2008, at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. The critics accused him of bringing an anchorman’s all-about-me approach to the debate, worrying more about asking his own questions than facilitating those of the ordinary citizens in the hall.
I had warned Brokaw that heat was coming no matter what. He talked afterward about that in an interview with my PBS colleague Tavis Smiley:
“Lehrer said, ‘Fair warning. No one will be happy when it’s over.’ And I called him today and said, ‘You could not have warned me enough, it turns out.’ But those are the consequences. I think the country is better off for it.”
Bob Schieffer was the moderator of the third debate—a sit-down event at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Most of the criticism of his work came from the predictable political opinion bloggers. Liberals/Democrats and conservatives/Republicans, each in their own way, accused Schieffer of favoring the other side.
Schieffer had confessed something to me after his maiden debate, the 2004 Bush-Kerry event in Tempe, Arizona.
“I have been on television so often for so long I thought there was no way in the world I would be nervous doing that kind of thing. Oh, how wrong I was. I was shaking like a leaf as I waited offstage for that to start.”
I had those same kinds of experiences, although my metaphors ran more along the lines of knife blades than leaves.
Gwen Ifill made some moderator history in the Palin-Biden event at Washington University in St. Louis. In the language of sports, she played hurt.
Three days before flying to St. Louis for the debate, she tripped over some of her research material at her Washington, D.C., home and broke her right ankle.
Were you in pain during the debate? I asked.
“Not a bit. The adrenaline was running. I didn’t feel a thing—until it was over.”
Ifill had another pain to survive as well. A few days before the debate, there was an announcement of a new book she was writing titled The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Some bloggers and others suggested that the book tainted her as a neutral moderator even though, as she said immediately, the book was not finished, particularly the ending that would deal with Obama specifically. It was just the title that upset some in the political world.
“The broken ankle, strange as it may seem, actually helped me get through that book storm,” Ifill said. “Between dealing with that and preparing for the debate itself I had no time or energy to deal with what I considered to be an unfair attack on my integrity.
“Besides, I knew that whatever, it would all come out in the end with how I handled the debate itself and what was written in my book.”
And that, of course, is exactly what happened. The critics went silent after both events and have remained so.
THERE IS AN intensely personal backstory about how I came to moderate one of the 2008 presidential debates—my eleventh.
A routine physical examination in April of that year turned up the fact that my aortic valve was deteriorating. It was serious enough to threaten congestive heart failure. My doctor Ramin Oskoui urged me to act quickly—to have open-heart surgery and replace the valve.
Kate and I, accompanied as always at key times by our daughters, went off to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to get the job done. There was some heightened risk because I had had an open-heart bypass operation in 1984 following a heart attack.
I was blessed by having two superb doctors on my case—cardiologist Roman DeSanctis and heart surgeon Cary Akins. They went about the business of replacing my aortic valve with that of a pig. Both doctors assured me that “if all goes as expected” I would not only be all right, I would come out feeling and acting ten years younger.
I didn’t believe a word of it, to tell the truth.
But, as it turned out, they were right. After a recovery period at home in Washington of just over two months, I was back to work on The NewsHour part-time and at the word processor writing my novels. It wasn’t long afterward that I felt fully recovered—and then some.
And then came the call from Janet Brown of the debate commission. It was early—weeks before anything had been said publicly about the coming debates between McCain and Obama, beyond when and where they would be.
Brown, now a good friend, laid it out straight: “If asked by the commission to moderate one of the 2008 debates, would you do it?” (At The NewsHour, we call that a “seventh-grade prom question.” “If I asked you to go to the prom with me, Natasha, would you go?”)
I was not expecting the invitation. I had already concluded after 2004, separate from my life with the valve and the pig, that I had done my last debate.
But in spite of that, I did talk again to the family—and a few friends.
As before, the discussion was mostly about whether I really wanted to do it.
I ended up saying yes to Janet Brown—one more time. In doing so, I came up with several reasons, including the fact that it would demonstrate convincingly that I really had recovered from my heart operation.
I was no invalid, by God! I had already anchored our NewsHour coverage of the two national party conventions in August, in fact.…
Ego impulses aside, the real reason was that I wanted to do it. This was what I did. I was a moderator.
CHAPTER 8
Mr. Jefferson, Among Others
Moderators are not just for and about presidential debates, obviously.
“Good morning from Austin, Texas … and welcome to the National Issues Convention … an experiment in democracy based on the premise that information and dialogue on issues leads to deliberation, to informed opinions, and thus to informed voters.”
Those were some of my opening words for one of the many other experiences that have yielded moderating rewards and strains.
The events have ranged from formal confrontations among the four leaders of the U.S. Congress and discussions of presidential character to the real beliefs of the founding fathers and an unprecedented public forum in Kansas City, Missouri, with the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke. Some have been nationally televised; others have taken place before audiences in a variety of smaller ve
nues.
Each, in its own way, has contributed to the learning and other curves that never end for those who regularly moderate public exchanges of any kind or size.
My favorites include a discussion involving Thomas Jefferson and his manservant, and an extraordinary Cold War retrospective by François Mitterrand, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Brian Mulroney, and George H. W. Bush.
That National Issues Convention in Austin was one of the hardest moderating jobs I have had. More than 400 citizens—466, to be exact—came together from all lifestyles, beliefs, and parts of the country for four days of talking and listening about what the 1996 presidential election should really be about. They were rich and poor, young and old, PhD’s and dropouts, informed and isolated, happy and angry, advocates and listeners.
Their discussions began among themselves and moved on to include issue experts and, finally, leading political figures in the 1996 presidential race. More than nine hours of the convention’s varied exchanges were broadcast live or on tape nationwide on PBS.
In an interesting precursory coincidence, the governor of Texas gave the welcoming remarks on Thursday night, and the vice president of the United States was the guest on that final “good morning” Sunday session.
They were, respectively, George W. Bush and Al Gore.
The heavy-duty centerpiece for the convention was a deliberative poll, called “the poll with a human face.” The purpose was to discover if and how solid information, civil discussion, and serious deliberation can cause voters to alter their opinions.
Senator Richard Lugar was there in person, while other contestants for the Republican presidential nomination—Phil Gramm, Steve Forbes, and Lamar Alexander—joined by satellite on huge television monitors. Bob Dole, the early front-runner, hadn’t even bothered to do that. Instead, he attended a campaign event at a Dartmouth College frat house in New Hampshire. (Seriously!)
While not part of any polling, deliberative or otherwise, the clear “winners” of the convention were Gore and Lugar, partly because they had actually shown up.
The Republican evening was three hours of moderator hell. Trying to facilitate coherent dialogue between delegates in the hall and the three airtime-hungry candidates via unstable satellite feeds, plus one who was physically present, was nightmarish. We repeatedly lost picture and, more important, the audio often cut in and out. That often forced me to repeat either a question or an answer—sometimes both—in order to keep the conversation going.
The faces of the three on giant screens often had a creepy Big Brother movie effect, particularly when the images flashed in and out of focus—or sight.
Lugar scored the highest, not simply because he was there but because he came across as a man of quiet intelligence and grace.
Gore’s one-hour Sunday morning session was a clear win for him. Knowing that the Clinton-Gore ticket was already way ahead in the polls against any potential Republican slate no doubt contributed to his relaxed and confident demeanor. He drew the delegates into easy back-and-forths.
There was an overwhelming consensus among the 466 people afterward that the simple exercise of being in the same room in listening mode with such a diverse group was exhilarating—in some cases, life changing.
My own favorite episodes involved a young black mother on welfare—a Democrat—and a middle-aged white businessman—a Republican. Neither had ever been in the real company of the other before, much less had a conversation as they were forced to do in their small group. After some initial and quite natural reluctance to deal with each other, they started talking—and listening.
When it was over, the man spoke with me and others about how “welfare mothers” really cared more about their children than getting government handouts—something he hadn’t really believed before. The woman mused about the man’s point that the constitution ensures equal opportunity but not outcomes.
“That was the single best event of its kind I have ever been involved in,” said Al Gore a week later at a small luncheon in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House. The lunch was a traditional one on State of the Union day for television anchors who would be covering the speech that night. Gore’s enthusiasm for what happened in Austin forced my friends Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings to hear all about it. And I loved that.
I felt the same way Al Gore did about the event itself. I, too, had never seen anything quite like it. It was so unique because the debating followed a sharing about one another as well as the issues. The discourse was truly—and neutrally—informed.
STAGED UNDER THE auspices of Colonial Williamsburg, my event with Mr. Jefferson took place before five thousand people in August 2009 at the Chautauqua Institution, the famous summer performance and lecture center in western New York State. Jefferson, played by Colonial Williamsburg’s regular actor Bill Barker, appeared with Jupiter, his servant slave, portrayed by Richard Josey.
I had not told Barker and Josey what I was going to ask them, except that it would be mostly about slavery and freedom. I was most impressed and fascinated with the realistic way these two men brought Jefferson and Jupiter so much to life and thought. They were in eighteenth-century dress sitting on a stage with me, like in any other two-guest discussion.
I asked Jupiter if he saw himself as a person or a slave.
“I see you as a man and I am the same,” Jupiter responded, looking at me. “My status as Negro in these colonies by the law is to be a slave to others. That is the nature of things.”
I asked Jefferson what it means to him to own a slave.
He said he seldom referred to them as slaves. “They are my people,” adding that he personally believed slavery was disgraceful and that he had always been at work to abolish the slave trade.
Jefferson declined to confirm that he had fathered children with slaves.
Jupiter said, “There are no children on Monticello that are fathered by Mr. Jefferson. There is nothing more that I can give you today, sir, than I have given you, and that is the truth.”
I’VE HAD A long relationship with Colonial Williamsburg that springs, among other delights, from my having served on its foundation board of trustees for many years.
It was in the restored House of Burgesses chamber there in 1996 that I moderated a special called PBS Debate Night, the first—and, as far as I know, only—public debate ever among the four top leaders of Congress.
Then Senate majority leader Trent Lott, Senate minority leader Tom Daschle, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and House minority leader Richard Gephardt went at it for ninety minutes.
My favorite exchange came over who could best manage the work of the Congress—Democrats or Republicans? It culminated in Gingrich’s boast that he had saved the taxpayers $500,000 a year by eliminating the fourteen full-time jobs of those who delivered buckets of ice to House members twice a day.
A much broader Williamsburg event in November 2007 was part of an ongoing PBS program/project called By the People. It brought a varied cast of fifty people from around the country to talk about the duties of citizenship in the twenty-first century.
The participants included craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Indianapolis 500 race car driver Janet Guthrie, saxophonist Branford Marsalis, Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan, Episcopal bishop Nathan Baxter, National Rifle Association executive Millie Hallow, evangelical minister Joel Hunter, U.S. Army major Ray Kimball, playwright David Henry Hwang, Arizona rancher Bill McDonald, and the mayors of Youngstown, Ohio, and Nebraska City, Nebraska.
At a Williamsburg event for a PBS special called Character Above All, nine historians, writers, and journalists sat around the House of Burgesses benches discussing presidential character. Each participant had general expertise or special knowledge of one or more modern-day presidents.
They were Stephen Ambrose, Michael Beschloss, Ben Bradlee, Robert Dallek, Hendrik Hertzberg, James Cannon, David McCullough, Peggy Noonan, and Tom Wicker. Seldom, if ever, has so much wisdom about
the presidency been assembled under one roof.
One sampling from Dallek:
Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln and FDR and TR and Wilson, Kennedy, Truman. They were great characters. They were great personalities. They were all larger than life. They impress themselves on our historical memory, and maybe there’s a mythological quality to each of them and maybe that is an essential requirement of it. But there is a special presidential quality to all of this and it has to do with vision and constancy and courage and also practical good sense, pragmatism. Every one of these great presidents was also a great pragmatist, I think.
I learned a special moderating lesson at a September 2007 forum at Colonial Williamsburg.
Three supreme Early American historians—Gordon Wood, Hunter Rawlings, and Joe Ellis—discussed what the founding fathers had in mind as an end product for their creation.
A combination of breaking news events and poor personal scheduling had left me in a car on the way from Washington to Williamsburg that morning without a forum question in my head.
So I just scribbled a list of “things.” Most were simple one- or two-word descriptions of issues the founders might have considered as they debated forming a new independent nation from thirteen breakaway British colonies.
I, of course, had no idea how Wood, Rawlings, and Ellis would respond. I had read a few of their books and I knew them personally, but that was as close as I was to the enterprise, which a prestigious crowd was expected to attend.
Within ten minutes of getting out of the car, I was on a stage in a large auditorium sorting out my thoughts about the upcoming discussion.
