“I would like to propose that we transform our circus-atmosphere presidential campaign into a great debate conducted in full view of all the people,” Adlai Stevenson wrote in This Week, in 1959, calling for regular half-hour debates between the candidates during the final eight weeks of the campaign. Congress held hearings, after which Stevenson got more or less what he was asking for, when Nixon met Kennedy in a television studio on September 26, 1960. Did it change the American Presidential campaign from a circus to a debate? No. But there have been tiny bursts of actual argument here and there.
“Finally, we tonight are on the stage together,” Hillary Clinton said at the start of last night’s debate, on the anniversary of Nixon and Kennedy’s first meeting. “Donald, it’s good to be with you.” It turned out to be not so good for Donald Trump to be with Hillary Clinton. But it was good for voters to see them argue.
Most Presidential debates are sidelong, as I wrote in the magazine, earlier this month. The candidates answer questions posed by the moderator and only engage with each other through glancing blows and darting remarks. This debate was unusually confrontational, which is exactly what its organizers were after. “We want the candidates to actually debate, to talk to each other,” Frank Fahrenkopf said, before the debate began. Fahrenkopf, as a co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates, served on a Committee on Format, whose priority, this time around, was getting the candidates to speak to each another. This priority was reflected in the style of the broadcast. Lester Holt, the anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” welcomed the audience while sitting at his desk, and, on the CNN broadcast, was never shown again.* The entire ninety-minute program consisted of a split screen, with Clinton on the right and Trump on the left. It’s “just the two of them; that’s what it’s all about,” Holt told audience members at the start, warning them to keep quiet so that the estimated hundred million television viewers could watch the main event, undistracted. (The audience didn’t keep quiet, and, honestly, the debate organizers have two choices: have a crowd in the room and allow clapping and booing, or, better still, don’t have one at all.)
Adlai Stevenson’s interest in promoting Presidential debates was a consequence of his two bids for the Presidency. In May of 1956, when Stevenson was running for the Democratic nomination, he challenged the former Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver to a debate. Kefauver agreed, and the two met in a one-hour face-off in Miami, broadcast by ABC, the first-ever televised debate between Presidential candidates. “We’re all in agreement on the format,” the moderator, Quincy Howe, said, introducing the program. “There’s going to be a three-minute opening statement from each of the two gentlemen here and a five-minute closing. . . . In between will be free-wheeling talk in which I act as a kind of a traffic cop, with the power to hand out parking tickets if anyone stays too long in one place or to enforce speed limits if anyone gets going too fast.” Howe, a CBS radio broadcaster, had earlier been the director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He cared about the quality of an argument.
The Republican National Committee chairman called the Stevenson-Kefauver debate “the biggest flop of the year”: “tired, sorry, and uninspiring.” But debating his opponent didn’t hurt Stevenson, who won the nomination. That September, a University of Maryland college student named Fred Kahn asked the Democratic National Committee to arrange for a debate between Stevenson and the G.O.P. nominee, Dwight Eisenhower. That never came to pass. Maybe it rankled Stevenson, who lost the election. Maybe he thought it would have gone differently if he and Ike had shared a stage. Whatever led him to propose televised Presidential debates in 1959, it worked. But the format had changed, and Howe’s “traffic cop” model of moderating was abandoned in favor of a format that asked less of the candidates, more of the moderators, and less of the electorate.
Holt’s handling of the Clinton-Trump debate was in the spirit of Howe, with Howe’s kind of restraint. Trump and Clinton never got to the bottom of anything, and they exchanged more barbs than views. But they showed voters how they think, and how they make claims. Trump said that the world is a mess, America’s foreign policy is a disaster, and the “inner city” is hell: “Our country is suffering because people like Secretary Clinton have made such bad decisions.” Clinton said that the country needs an experienced leader and a President with actual solutions: “I’ve tried to be very specific about what we can and what we should do.” She got to some of those specifics. Trump levelled charges. “You are going to approve one of the biggest tax increases in history,” he told Clinton. “My tax cut is the biggest since Ronald Reagan.” There’s a narrow band of behavior within which Clinton can acceptably act, and she stayed well within it, which was both good and bad. There’s a wide band of behavior within which Trump can acceptably act, and he stayed well within it, too, with much the same result. She did very well, but she didn’t soar. He did very badly, but he didn’t bottom out.
Trump flouted the rules. “Let’s start the clock again, Lester,” Clinton said to Holt. Trump challenged Clinton’s facts; Clinton challenged Trump’s, directing viewers to fact checking on her Web site. (“Take a look at mine also!” Trump piped up.) Holt pushed Trump on the birther nonsense; Trump blathered incoherently. Holt pushed both candidates on trade, and on race. But, mainly, he allowed them to push each other. “We have to restore trust,” Clinton said, when Holt asked about the state of race relations in the United States. “We need law and order,” Trump said. “If we don’t have it, we’re not going to have a country.” Clinton talked about policies; Trump talked about people, especially “bad people.” At the end, Trump, who has called for deporting millions of immigrants and banning millions more on the basis of their religion, said his problem with Hillary Clinton is that she is “not nice.”
Sixty-six million people watched Kennedy debate Nixon in 1960. A Roper poll reported that fifty-seven per cent said the debate influenced their vote; six per cent said it determined their vote, and, of those, seventy-two per cent decided to vote for Kennedy. As Theodore White once pointed out, if the polling was correct, Kennedy’s performance in the debate won him two million votes. He defeated Nixon by only a hundred and twelve thousand. Polls released before last night’s debate showed that Clinton and Trump were neck and neck before they went head to head.
It has been an appalling campaign. It has been a terrible year. But it was a good debate.
- This post has been updated to clarify that CNN was not the host of Monday night’s debate.
_Read more about the first debate: John Cassidy on Donald Trump's self-inflicted errors, Amy Davidson on how Trump failed to bully Clinton, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells on how Clinton turned Trump into Mitt Romney.
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