We live in deep southern Illinois and it is the home of one of the precursors of the modern presidential debates--the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, one of which was held in Jonesboro, Illinois, not far from here! Although neither Abraham Lincoln nor Stephen A. Douglas were running for president at that time, the debates took on national significance anyway, as both men ran for president in 1860. In those days, each candidate would take to the podium and drone on for hours on end, a far cry from the sound bite segments that pass for presidential debates in this age. The first modern presidential debate was a series of four held between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon during September and October of 1960.

The thing that set the Kennedy-Nixon debates apart was the fact that they were the first televised debates. Those who heard the debates on traditional radio believed that Nixon had won the debate, while the large audience who saw the debates via television thought that Kennedy had won. Both men were good debaters but the telegenic Kennedy looked better on the black and white television screen than did the poorly made up and pasty/pale looking Nixon. Kennedy also appeared more at ease and at home with the audience than did Nixon. In one of those debates furniture even came into play as Nixon banged his leg on a piece of it and appeared to limp as he came out to face Kennedy. There is little doubt that those debates helped propel John Kennedy into the White House. They were so effective for the lesser known Kennedy that no president chose to take part in any more of them until 1976 when Jimmy Carter faced off against Gerald R. Ford. Ford faced the headwinds of the Nixon pardon back in 1974 which a majority of the electorate found distasteful but he was the first president to perform a gaffe when he stated that the countries of eastern Europe were not under communist domination and never would be under a Ford Administration. There is dispute down to this date about how much that gaffe cost Ford because, in the end, he got about the popular vote that his positive presidential polls had been showing. It did illustrate the perils of the incumbency in presidential debates when they have very little to gain and much to lose when faced off against the usually less well known challenger.

In 1980, the then incumbent Jimmy Carter continued the tradition started with Nixon/Kennedy when he faced off against the challenger Ronald Reagan. Carter too faced the headwinds of what was happening to the economy with its inflationary spiral and the great urgency to get the American embassy hostages out of Iran, a situation that had been going on for over a year by that time. Carter was far better known than Reagan despite Reagan’s stints as a Hollywood actor and two terms as the governor of California. Reagan was regarded suspiciously by much of the American electorate because of so many of his right wind views. In this case, the debates made all of the difference in the presidential race. Carter constantly attacked Reagan and the turning point came when Carter said that he had consulted his daughter Amy about some world even and Reagan replied that the number of distressed American would make a ring around the world if they were strung together. Carter had been leading in the polls for much of the campaign but those comments and the increasingly more impinging hostage crisis caused the election to blow up on Carter and he lost in one of the greatest landslides in American political history. The debates played a definite peat in that as they humanized Reagan and took much of the doubt out of the average Americans mind.

In 1984, the then incumbent Reagan took on Walter Mondale in what would be one of the most lopsided victories in American political history. Reagan, then in his mid seventies had one sub par performance when he rambled and Mondale declared victory in that debate. This was the debate where the famous “Where’s the beef� comment was made which was a play off of a popular fast food commercial. However when the next debate took place, the Reagan humor came out when he stated that he would not take advantage of the younger Mondale’s political inexperience even though Mondale was not that much younger than Reagan and had quite a bit of experience on his own. This race was also a blowout landslide and the debates played very little in its outcome.

In 1988, Reagan’s vice president George H. W. Bush tool on the democrat Michael Dukakas in what first appeared to be a good possibility for a Dukakas victory. Two things happened in that race. First, Bush appointed a young and relatively unknown senator from Indiana named Dan Quayle to be his running mate which caused a flurry of media coverage that took the focus off of the Dukakas campaign for several days. There were vice presidential debates during that time and in the Lloyd Benson-Dan Quayle debate Quayle compared himself to John F. Kennedy at that stage of his career. Benson looked at him and said “Senator! I knew John Kennedy and John Kennedy was a friend of mine. You’re no John Kennedy!� This got some play until the next day or so when the Kennedy library announced that president Kennedy barely knew Lloyd Bentsen. Then, in the debates between Bush and Dukakas, Dukakas was asked a question about what he would do if his wife Kitty were raped and killed. His emotionless, technocratic answer made him appear to be an uncaring person, particularly when stacked up against the more personable Bush who would remain on the stage after the debate was over while Dukakas would hurry away.

1992 saw the first of the debates with a third party candidate present when Ross Perot attempted to sway the electorate with his calls for deficit reform. It also saw the emergence of one of the most consummate politicians to ever grace a stage--William Jefferson Clinton. Clinton was a natural politician if one ever existed and seemed to thrive on adversity from the start of his campaign on through until his election as president. Bush made a huge gaffe during this debate cycle during a debate which featured questions from the audience when he looked down at his watch at one point, leaving the audience and the American people believing that he didn’t really want to be there at all. It was a definite deciding point in which the incumbent Bush never seemed to connect with the American people as he had in his first run for the presidency. In a three way race, Clinton won by a conformable five points even though he did not get fifty percent of the popular vote.

In 1996, Clinton ran for re-election against the senate majority leader, the Republican Bob Dole of Kansas. Dole had already gotten off to a rocky start that January when he gave the Republican response to Clinton’s state of the union address and seemed old, ill prepared and wooden. The debates between the two were mainly uneventful and Clinton did nothing to hurt his chances for reelection by participating in them. Ross Perot was back for one last feeble attempt as a third party entrant and did siphon off enough votes to deny Clinton fifty percent of the popular vote. Clinton never did have many problems with election campaigns but his sex life made so public later on in that presidency would affect, to some degree anyway, the 2000 campaign when his vice president Al Gore ran to take his boss and friends place.

The 2000 campaign was one of the most interesting in American history and people still speak of it today. The debates played a very important part because they brought to the forefront the second term governor of Texas, George H.W. Bush’s son and namesake, George W. Bush. The best one could say about George W. Bush is that he was down to earth and somewhat folksy and was able to put people at ease. This was not the case for Al Gore who made everybody uneasy with his constant condescending approach to his encounters with the younger Bush. It was apparent that Gore did not like Bush at all. He would sigh during Bush’s segments and even walked over and intruded on Bush’s personal space at one point in the debates. There is no question that the debates had a negative effect on Gore as Bush was pulling ahead in the polls in the last days of the campaign before his drunk driving conviction when he was a youth brought his campaign back to earth. The rest is history as Gore won the popular vote with a half a million vote plurality while Bush won the election in the now famously contested vote in Florida and with the intervention of the United States Supreme Court on his behalf. Gore was so afraid of Clinton’s reputation in the wake of the Monica Lewinski scandal that he refused to use him as a campaign surrogate. A fact that was not lost on some voters who might have supported Gore if Clinton had appeared for him.

In 2004, Bush ran for re election against the Massachusetts junior senator John Kerry. Bush was running ahead of the Democrat Kerry for much of the campaign until they met in the decisive debates. Kerry did well enough in the debates with his skills honed on the senate debating floor that he practically erased the difference between the two men. Many things can be said about this race from Swift Boating on down to more mundane events but Bush ended up winning reelection with the votes of the state of Ohio providing the difference.

2008 was the great election between the current sitting president Barack Obama and the senior senator from Arizona and prisoner of war hero John McCain. Although the debates were important, everything was overshadowed by two significant events. The first was McCain’s selection of the first term Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his vice presidential pick. Palin’s selection highlighted for everyone the fact that selecting a vice presidential running mate illustrates for all the world to see just what kind of judgment that the candidate might bring to the White House. McCain was older when he ran and his vice presidential choice with his advanced age could be very significant and important. Palin failed the test miserably. The second event was the implosion of the nation’s economy in the fall of that year and that far overshadowed everything else. Obama’s victory margin might have been far greater if he had not been the first black nominee of either major party to run for president of the United States. At best, Obama was a competent debater who was known to be very professorial and a bit long winded.

Barack Obama has little to gain from the 2012 presidential debates and will be hard pressed to match the skills of a nominee facing an incumbent who is, himself, facing some significant headwinds on job creation. The one thing going for Obama is the fact that Mitt Romney is one of the most disliked candidates in American political history. Romney has many challenges of his own and not the least of them is the fact that his mouth occasionally has a mind of its own. Both of these men will be facing a thin slice of the electorate that has not made up its mind already. The best that Obama can hope to do is to lay out his record over the last four years which, taken in the context of what he inherited from the disastrous Bush years, does not look all that bad at all. Still yet, Romney does have some talking points and just being on the stage with the sitting president will, to some degree, be an advantage for him. Looking at Romney’s past, he is likely do or say anything that he thinks will get the job done for him during these debates and if we were the Obama campaign we would try to be ready for anything. Both of these men are very intelligent but Obama has the great advantage of having been president for the last four years. What he has been through and some of the great decisions that he has had to make should boost his confidence to a very great degree. The best thing the president can do is to not underestimate Romney, show him some respect, and to simply be himself. Romney’s forty seven percent comment should do all the rest.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.