The Debate: Moron Meets Creep
But if a lot of life is conducted by people who are non compos mentis, practically all of politics is. I recently reviewed a book by Michael Waldman?Potus Speaks, a chronicle of Waldman's seven years as a Clinton aide and speechwriter. What's astonishing is how much of Clinton's decision-making has been done on the fly. One almost wouldn't call it decision-making at all: it's more like the on-the-spot reactions of a bad student who's stayed up all night studying on No-Doz. (Although decision-making itself is a bit overrated. The wisest thing I've ever heard on the topic came from the brilliant radio producer Chris Turpin. When Chris was at the late, lamented Monitor Radio in Boston, he said to me, "They've given me this promotion on the belief that I'm a good 'decision-maker.' And they mean it. They seem not to care if I'm making good decisions or bad ones, so long as I make them.")
This comes close to establishing an Iron Law of Executive Incompetence, one that would go a long way toward explaining how the Clinton White House has worked for the past eight years. Waldman describes one State of the Union address where at noon on the day of the speech, when a draft of the speech is usually printed and sent over to Congress, Clinton is only just getting under way. At 2 in the afternoon, he calls up Ross Perot and is inspired to write a whole new speech. Waldman recounts all sorts of other incidents in which Clinton or his staff behave like stoned people, feeding the wrong speech into the teleprompter, using dummy statistics rather than real ones during an economic policy speech, forgetting to format the printout of a policy chat so all the words get jammed together, as on 1970s double-album-cover lyrics sheet of the sort one used to clean dope on.
I thought of this as I was watching the first presidential debate. Both candidates looked like college freshmen who'd pulled all-nighters. Gore did the version where you write an excellent, precise article, all of which is copied out of an encyclopedia?and hope the professor doesn't notice. Bush did the version where you set 2-inch margins on the typewriter, hand in the paper 500 words short and blather on with a lot of sentences beginning, "And so finally, therefore..."?and hope the professor doesn't notice. To my eyes, Gore wiped the floor with Bush. In no sense was this the "draw" that television pundits portrayed it as. (Even less was it the neutral event one saw in newspaper headlines. Pretty much all of them covered the debate with leads that could have been written the day before it: "Bush and Gore Come Out Swinging." "Sharp Exchange of Views in First Presidential Debate.") Sorry: it was a massacre. It's not just that Gore had a lot of facts and details at his command and Bush didn't. It's the way the two delivered their presentations. Bush looked like such a...such a sidekick.
Bush doesn't deserve all the blame for this. It's become something of a cliche for journalists to congratulate those lucky colleagues of theirs who get to be debate moderators on what a "good job" they did. Bernie Shaw actually always does a good job of moderating a debate, and the vice-presidential one he ran the other night was excellent. The accusation that Shaw has a weakness for softball questions is not true. Remember that it was he who asked Michael Dukakis that dazzling would-you-support-capital-punishment-if-your-wife-were-raped-and-killed question, and Dukakis not only answered no but replied in such a way that it sounded that he'd like to provide the hypothetical mugger with a subsidy. Although there was something about Dukakis?wasn't there??that made him attract unanswerable questions like lint.
Given that there's such a strong "Wasn't-Judy-just-wonderful-last-night?" bias to the way the press covers its own debate coverage, something has got to be said: Jim Lehrer stank up the room as moderator last week. If there were such a thing as a Carole Simpson Lifetime Achievement Award for unproductive questioning, condescension and fecklessness, Lehrer would have won it. Let me stress again that Bush was wretched during the debate. To repeat a phrase that won me several dozen angry e-mails when I used it on CNN, Bush gave rise to legitimate worries that he was below the (extremely forgiving) threshold of intellectual competence required for holding the presidency. Particularly on foreign policy. Particularly on Kosovo, where his smarmy support for President Clinton's invasion made him guilty not just of intellectual incompetence but of intellectual cowardice. Bush's big spin sentence of the evening was how Gore "believes in nation-building"?through which Dubya hoped to evoke in viewers' minds images of 18 naked American corpses being dragged through Mogadishu. One can admit that we're in Sensible Minds Can Differ territory. I myself am of two (sensible) minds on the Somalia invasion. But you cannot, as Bush did, claim to be the scourge of nation-building and hold that President Clinton's Kosovo operation was just okeydokey as far as anyone's concerned.
Bush deserved all the opprobrium that was heaped on him for his intellectual sloppiness. But he also deserved a level playing field, and that's just what Lehrer didn't give him. Gore looked almost steroid-enhanced in his aggression, and you can understand how a press lackey would have been intimidated by the performance?not to mention by knowing that one of the two participants in the debate was going to be his president four months from now. But the fact that this is a presidential debate made it more important for Lehrer to stand up to his interlocutors, and it's there that he fell on his face. In his jolly, hey-we're-all-friends-here manner, he allowed Al Gore to derive an advantage from his having lousier manners than Bush.