The campaign that's run from sea to shining sea will be won or lost on the small shimmering screen. ROGER FRANKLIN reports.
NEW YORK - In 1940, when television was still a novelty, someone at the long-defunct DuMont Network had the bright idea of setting up one of the first mobile cameras near the podium at the Democratic National Convention.
Perhaps the organisers thought politicians would appreciate seeing their faces on the fishbowl screen, or maybe it was a mercenary hope that the nation's legislators would take steps to encourage the growth of the new medium.
Whatever the reason, at least as American author Gore Vidal remembers the moment when the single monitor at the back of the auditorium flickered to life, the reaction that rippled through those assembled around it was one of absolute horror. Vidal was but a teenager at the time, a precocious prep school lad who spent his summer vacations serving as the eyes of a blind uncle, United States Senator T. P. Gore, a distant relative of present Vice-President Albert Gore.
"Weird things began to happen," Vidal recently recalled, explaining that the quintessential politician of the pre-TV age was an orator in the classic tradition. "You'd see him at a distance, up there with long hair, sweeping gestures."
But up close, in the glass eye of the TV screen, that same revered statesman projected a rather different image. Vidal can no longer recall which congressman happened to be speaking when the box of wires and humming valves came to life. But he remembers the close-up image on that little screen as if he had witnessed it yesterday: the 5 o'clock shadow, the flecks of spittle, the curled collar and cigar-stained teeth.
As he tried to describe the spectacle to his uncle, young Vidal groped for an image a blind man might understand. "Boris Karloff," he recalls whispering all those years ago. "Boris Karloff about to strangle a child!"
Six decades later, Vidal picked up the thread. "The orator was used to projecting this huge voice and face to 100,000 people and he'd never been seen close up before," he continued, adding: "A whole generation of politicians was swept away after that convention, never to be seen again."
And tomorrow, under the spotlights of a Boston television station, the chances are that another politician will join the lost legion. When George W. Bush and Al Gore enter the studio for their long-awaited faceoff, they will be running neck and neck in what polls are saying is perhaps the closest presidential race since 1960, when John F. Kennedy kept Richard Nixon out of the White House by less than one-tenth of 1 per cent of the popular vote.
By the time Bush and Gore have finished their performances, chances are that one of them will be dead meat. It could be a gaffe that determines the loser, as was the case when a nervous and tongue-tied Gerald Ford asserted that Poland was not under the control of the then Soviet Union.
Or it might a witty line that captures the viewers' hearts and nails down the affection of what the polls show to be a large and unusually volatile mass of undecided voters. Something, for example, like 72-year-old Ronald Reagan's smooth quip in 1984 that he would not make "the youth and inexperience" of 58-year-old challenger Walter Mondale an issue in the campaign.
"When Reagan said that, I knew that was one election I was never going to win," Mondale said last week. "The moderators laughed, the audience laughed. Heck, even I had to laugh, although I know I was crying inside. The camera already loved Reagan. And after that great line, the American people were sure that they could love him for four more years, too.
"One great line, that was all it took to sweep away doubts about his age, and whether he was still sharp enough for the toughest job in the world."
But given George W.'s well deserved reputation for mangled syntax and floating pronouns, and Al Gore's wooden tendencies, humour is not likely to be the deciding factor this time. As Michael Deaver, Reagan's former media guru noted at the weekend, "These are two guys who should leave the gags alone."
"The key to winning this debate, and the two that are scheduled to follow it, will be which candidate strikes the undecided voters as less unpleasant than they might have thought he was.
"Neither man should be aiming to win outright, although that would be good if it happens. No, the smart candidate will be aiming to make the undecided voters walk away from their sets saying, 'Gee, he's not so bad after all."'
That would seem to put Bush at a disadvantage. Unlike Gore, who can rattle off obscure statistics and congressional arcana at the drop of a hat, Bush is better on the big picture than the fine print. Yet with three minutes or so to provide a response, he must find a way to fill the airtime with a string of reasonably coherent sentences.
Nor can he be too aggressive, though there is no doubt he would dearly love to go for the throat since Gore's lies and liabilities make such a tempting target. It was only last week, for example, that the Vice-President told yet another whopper, this one about how his mother pays three times as much for the exact same arthritis medication that the Vice-President gives to his aged dog. Yet while not a word of that anecdote was true, Bush would be a dummy to bring it up directly - at least according to Deaver.
"Nobody realises it because Reagan always seemed like such a genial fellow, but we had to work very, very hard to keep his temper in check," Deaver said. "He didn't get riled often, but when he did it wasn't pretty. If Carter or Mondale had realised that, if they had goaded him to erupt, they might easily have won the debates - and the elections."
Instead, what Bush will have to do is hope that Gore's fundraising scandals and self-serving distortions ("I invented the internet") are raised by a question from the moderator. "Then, and only then, can Bush let the viewers see some fire," Deaver explained. "But not too much. This is TV not the floor of the Senate. These debates are about perception; politics is what they're not about."
And Gore? Though he has a stellar reputation as a TV debater, having trounced both Ross Perot and Republican Vice-Presidential aspirant Jack Kemp in 1996, he cannot be too vicious this time, nor too patronising.
"Bush goes into this as the underdog which paradoxically, because of the intimate dynamics of TV, makes him the better placed of the pair," Deaver explained. "Expectations that he will succeed are so low that, if he betters them, he's done very well. In other words, he can flub some of the issues and still emerge as an acceptable candidate."
Leave the final word to 60 Minutes veteran producer Don Hewitt, who floor-managed the Kennedy-Nixon TV debate as a young man.
"People who heard the debate on the radio thought Nixon won," Hewitt recalled. "But on the TV, he lost because he neglected to shave and refused to wear makeup. Kennedy looked just great and the audience didn't care what he said. They just loved the look of him.
"The look. In the TV age, that is what politics is all about."
US Presidential race neck and neck, face to face
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