David Greenberg - Specialized Research AI at MIT

David Greenberg

Torchlight parades for the television age:
the presidential debates as political ritual

During the 2008 vice presidential de-

bate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was
pressed by her Democratic rival, Dela-
ware Senator Joe Biden, and moderator
Gwen I½ll to reply to a question she had
previously ignored. The chipper Palin,
who thrived on the perception of being
persecuted, demurred. “I may not an-
swer the questions that either the mod-
erator or you want to hear,” she parried,
“but I’m going to talk straight to the
American people.”1

For this statement, Palin suffered not
only rebuke, but ridicule. Flaunting her
intent to duck a question amounted to
a failure of manners. Part of the perfor-
mance of a presidential (or vice presi-
dential) debate, after all, consists of fol-
lowing certain conventions. One is that
candidates are supposed to act as if they
are there to report to the public their
ticket’s positions on prominent policy
issues, thereby helping voters ½gure out
which party better matches their own
preferences. According to this logic,
Palin’s sin lay not in her evasion of the
question–a common enough occur-
rence in the debates–but in her un-
abashed admission of the evasion. If
a gaffe, in the journalist Michael Kins-
ley’s formulation, is when a politician

tells the truth, Palin told the truth with-
out even the customary inadvertence.2
Kinsley’s axiom, quoted often dur-
ing the gaffe-ridden 2008 campaign, re-
mains in currency because it highlights
the power of the unspoken and some-
times unrecognized assumptions that
underpin our politics. These assump-
tions aren’t always true or even justi½-
able. But the public, particularly those
in the news media who shape our dis-
course, has a stake in maintaining
them. They serve a useful purpose.
An underlying premise of the dis-
course about the presidential debates
is that they exist to inform viewers,
who watch them with open minds to
learn about the candidates and decide
how to vote. In other words, grandiose
as it may sound, our culture assigns the
debates a vital democratic role: demo-
cratic theory holds that effective self-
government depends on an informed
citizenry, and the debates, more than
any other vehicle, are supposed to teach
voters what they still need to know
about the candidates in the fall of a pres-
idential election season. Accordingly,
we eagerly anticipate these contests as
potential turning points for the cam-
paigns, the only scheduled events that
might by design win or lose votes for
one candidate or the other overnight.

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Journalists invariably speak of them as
a rare chance for those all-important
undecided voters to make up their end-
lessly wavering minds. In recent years
networks have even convened focus
groups of the vacillators on whose fleet-
ing impressions the nation hinges, inter-
viewing them on air after each clash to
see if they were moved to reach any deci-
sions that might collectively alter a cam-
paign’s outcome.

Of course, given the evasions, boiler-

plate, scripted jokes, and attention to
stagecraft that routinely permeate the
debates, it’s hard to maintain that they
ful½ll this purpose of informing the in-
dependent-minded viewer. On the con-
trary, they seem to fail at this task often
enough to earn them unremitting dis-
paragement from the same pundits who
hold them to such lofty standards. Ever
since the ½rst televised presidential con-
tests, the 1960 “Great Debates” between
John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon,
critics have complained that the specta-
cles are not debates at all, but well-cho-
reographed joint press conferences–
marred, as The New York Times editori-
alized in 1976, by “their show-business
nature; their heavy reliance on rehears-
al and grooming by professional image-
makers; the concern for appearance over
substance.” The Times noted, “The 1976
presidential debates resemble the Lin-
coln-Douglas debates, to which they are
inevitably compared, as much as a town
meeting resembles–well, a television
spectacular.”3

Nothing encapsulates the view of the
debates as super½cial piffle better than
the inevitable–and inevitably invidi-
ous–contrasts with those legendary Il-
linois Senate debates. Journalists have
no corner on these glib comparisons. In
Amusing Ourselves to Death, the late, un-
amused media critic Neil Postman railed
against the Kennedy-Nixon contests as

a pale imitation of Lincoln-Douglas.
The Kennedy-Nixon debates, he said,
marked a passage from “the Age of
Exposition” to “the Age of Show Busi-
ness.” The hours-long, touring contests
between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen
Douglas in the fall of 1858 exhibited “a
kind of oratory that may be described as
literary,” with “a semantic, paraphras-
able, propositional content,” Postman
continued, while the four Nixon-Kenne-
dy clashes were empty charades made
for television, which “speaks in only one
persistent voice–the voice of entertain-
ment.”4

Please, Mr. Postman. Scholars should
know better than to traf½c in such nos-
talgia. The Lincoln-Douglas contests
provided plenty of entertainment, too,
along with double-talk, cheap shots,
pandering, and no small concern with
appearances. “There is much to learn
from the Lincoln-Douglas debates
about the politics of the 1850s,” Michael
Schudson has written, “but there are
no lessons to ‘apply’ to our own time,
certainly not in the form of a rebuke
to a purportedly diminished political
culture.”5 Differences between the two
sets of debates are real, but to judge the
change as only decline is to make a mor-
al judgment, not a historical one.

In short, both the celebrations of the

debates as a fount of insight into the
candidates’ ½tness to govern and the
denigrations of their lifelessness and
theatricality miss the point. Both rest
on flawed assumptions about what
the debates are there to do. Yet if we try
instead to conceive of the debates’ role
and purpose differently, we may perhaps
appreciate the democratic function that
they do perform: not the provision of
vital data to blank-slate voters seeking
to form a considered judgment about
the candidates, but rather the stimula-
tion and engagement of broader public

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Dædalus Spring 2009

David
Greenberg

interest in politics. This contribution,
while more modest than the grand
claims frequently made on the debates’
behalf, nonetheless goes some way to-
ward renewing voters’ political com-
mitments and enriching democracy.

The discourse about the democratic

promise of the debates dates back to
the Kennedy-Nixon contests. Since
1948, when Tom Dewey of New York
and Harold Stassen of Minnesota
squared off for an hour in pursuit of
the Republican nomination, presiden-
tial primary contenders had occasion-
ally taken to jousting over the radio.
But for both political and legal reasons
–mainly the fear that federal equal-
time regulations would require the in-
clusion of all manner of fringe candi-
dates in a prime-time free-for-all–
televised general-election debates re-
mained a dream. Only after the quiz
show scandals of the late 1950s did the
calculus change. With the networks’
reputations suffering, a dose of high-
minded public interest programming
suddenly seemed like the perfect tonic.
Congress suspended the nettlesome
equal-time clause of the 1934 Commu-
nications Act, and the networks set
about conceiving television programs
much like the very quiz shows that they
sought to displace. Like the Lincoln-
Douglas contests, their entertainment
value was part of the draw from the ½rst.
Not wishing to be seen as reducing

public affairs to the level of Milton
Berle, network spokesmen took pains to
portray the debates as something more
than a commercial enterprise: as a civ-
ic boon, a cure for an ailing democracy.
Coming at a time when Americans were
grappling with a perceived sense of in-
authenticity in politics, these arguments
were not insincere. For much of the
twentieth century, the public had grown

anxious that modernity was weakening
democracy. A series of changes, includ-
ing the astounding growth of the feder-
al government, America’s rise to global
leadership, the decline of parties, and
the Progressive Era’s efforts to clean up
politics, combined to make government
a more important force in people’s lives,
but at the same time a more distant one
as well. As Jürgen Habermas put it in
The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere, citizens’ “contact with the state
[now came to] occur . . . in the rooms
and anterooms of the bureaucracy,” de-
cidedly impersonal venues. Meanwhile,
new media of mass communication–
½lm, radio, later television–gave audi-
ences an illusion of familiarity with na-
tional political ½gures that print could
not, even as they encouraged the feeling
that politics was playing out in a theat-
rical display on a faraway stage, remote
from their own lives and concerns. The
emerging political culture seemed to
downgrade Habermas’s celebrated “ra-
tional-critical discourse” that he posit-
ed was central to the Enlightenment
conception of democracy.6

The rhetoric surrounding the televised
debates–echoing the rhetoric surround-
ing television’s coverage of the national
party conventions and several other as-
pects of presidential politics–suggested
that the new medium could restore a
form of town-hall democracy in an im-
personal age of mass media. Televised
debates would bring an intimacy back
to politics. The candidates would be in
everyone’s living rooms for sixty min-
utes, on four separate occasions, talk-
ing plainly and directly to the citizenry.
Voters could use their autonomous intel-
ligence in evaluating the two aspirants
for the leadership of the free world.

And yet if a restoration was promised,
television–that symbol of modern times
–was not to be effaced. It was cast as the

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hero, not the villain, of the civic revival
story. cbs President Frank Stanton ar-
gued that the televised debates were tai-
lor-made for the mass-media age. In
the nineteenth century, he noted, large
throngs turned out at campaign events
such as torchlight parades and mass ral-
lies; amid alcohol, music, and colorful
costumes, they would feed off one an-
other’s partisan passions. Writing in
1960, just after the Kennedy-Nixon de-
bates, Stanton dismissed those old-style
gatherings as anachronistic, as calculat-
ed, in his words, “not to inform, or to
create an atmosphere conducive to the
appraisal of information, but to whip
up attitudes capable of overcoming
any temptation to judiciousness.” By
his own day, he said, America could no
longer “afford the blind, uncritical au-
tomatic support of one man against an-
other, whatever his insight, his judg-
ment, or his qualities of leadership.”
The televised debates–an updated,
twentieth-century substitute for the
nineteenth-century outdoor specta-
cles–would treat voters as indepen-
dent of mind, enlightening them about
the candidates’ stands and enabling
them to weigh the issues with the care
they deserved. Modern democracy de-
manded no less.7
Briefs like Stanton’s set the standards

by which the debates would be judged.
More often than not, alas, they were
judged as falling short. Rather than ed-
ucating voters about the key differen-
ces between the candidates, went the
critique, the tv extravaganzas stressed
shallow qualities such as looks and
speaking style, while allowing the pres-
idential aspirants to avoid precisely
the kind of substantive back-and-forth
that the event was meant to foster. This
critique of the debates as plotted and
scripted, as valuing image over sub-

stance, implied that they weren’t meet-
ing their foremost obligation. Voters
were instead being treated to a pageant
of skilled performances, clever sound
bites, prefabricated statements from
stump speeches, and deft equivocations
that aimed not to help voters assess the
candidates’ relative positions on the is-
sues, but simply to win them over by
strength of charm, wit, polish, misinfor-
mation, and spin. Even the jokes that oc-
casionally brought down the house were
known to have been devised in advance
by a sharp wordsmith, with the candi-
date charged merely with ½nding the op-
portune moments to deploy them. This
criticism of the debates was the flip side
of the hope that they would restore a ra-
tional-critical discourse. It was the fear
that they reinforced an irrational, uncrit-
ical discourse.

Exhibit A in the case for the debates’
alleged substancelessness was the plain
fact of Kennedy’s victory. That mytholo-
gy is so well-known that it scarcely bears
repeating. With tv sets now in nine of
ten American homes, an estimated sev-
enty million people watched Kennedy
and Nixon square off on September 26.
Viewers saw a sharp contrast: Kennedy,
standing calmly in a dark suit, projected
unflappability. Handsome, relaxed, he
answered questions crisply, snuf½ng out
any doubts that he might be too callow
for the job. Nixon, recovering from a
knee infection and a cold, looked terri-
ble. Sweat streaked the pancake make-
up he had applied to his ½ve-o’clock
shadow, and his gray suit blended in
with the walls. Afterward, the press,
as if by unanimous consent, blamed
Nixon’s appearance for his loss. “Fire
the make-up man,” Nixon’s aide Herb
Klein was told. “Everybody in this part
of the country thinks Nixon is sick.
Three doctors agreed he looked as if
he had just suffered a coronary.”8

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Dædalus Spring 2009

David
Greenberg

There is no doubt that Kennedy

looked better. There is also little doubt
that debates helped him. Kennedy’s
pollster Lou Harris wrote a memo after
the debate noting that the senator had
opened up a 48 to 43 percent lead in his
latest survey, “the ½rst time that either
candidate has been able to show the
other open water. This is almost wholly
the result of the Monday night debate,”
Harris asserted.9 Other public polls
showed a similar trend.

What is open to doubt is whether Ken-

nedy’s victory owed as much to a pure-
ly visual superiority to Nixon as is com-
monly thought. No empirical research
directly supports the claim. The main
piece of evidence supposedly buttres-
sing it is the widespread notion that ra-
dio listeners believed Nixon had won.
But that assertion is dubious. The his-
torian-journalist Teddy White proba-
bly deserves the blame for etching it
in the accounts of the debates. In his
Making of the President, 1960, the urtext
for chroniclers of the Great Debates,
White wrote, “Those who heard the de-
bates on radio, according to sample sur-
veys”–surveys that White neither spec-
i½ed nor footnoted–“believed that the
two candidates came off almost equal”
(but not, it should be added, that Nix-
on won). “Yet every survey of those
who watched the debates on television,”
White added–again, providing no de-
tails–suggested that Nixon had done
poorly. “It was the picture image that
had done it.” Even more vaguely, the
syndicated columnist Ralph McGill
said that a sampling of “a number of
people” he spoke to who listened on
radio “unanimously thought Mr. Nixon
had the better of it.” Earl Mazo of the
New York Herald Tribune recorded a simi-
lar anecdotal impression. But only one
formal survey, by a Philadelphia market
research ½rm, supports the claim of Nix-

on’s radio superiority, and its methods
have been called into question.10

Equally dubious is the idea that the
debates gave short shrift to “substance,”
at least if measured by discussion of the
venerated “issues.” For all the accusa-
tions that the candidates postured ex-
cessively, or that tv focused too much
on smiles and stubble, a countervailing
line of critique held something like the
opposite: not that the debates were ut-
terly vapid, but that the rapid-½re, infor-
mation-rich answers prevented viewers
from taking some kind of broader mea-
sure of the men. “Not even a trained po-
litical observer,” noted the journalist
Douglass Cater, who moderated one de-
bate, “could keep up with the cross ½re
of fact and counterfact, of the rapid ref-
erences to Rockefeller Reports, Lehman
amendments, prestige analyses, gnp
and a potpourri of other so-called facts.
Or was the knack of merely seeming
well-informed what counted with the
viewer?” Public opinion expert Samuel
Lubell agreed, citing voters he inter-
viewed who “tried to make sense of the
arguments of the candidates ‘but the
more we listened, the more confused
we got.’”11

What matters here isn’t so much
whether the debates really did exalt
mere “image” as the more basic fact
that such a belief took hold and en-
dured. Perhaps the most lasting artic-
ulation of this belief came from the
historian Daniel Boorstin in his now-
classic 1961 work The Image. “[M]ore
important than what we think of the
presidential candidate,” Boorstin ar-
gued, bemoaning the rise of television
and media manipulation in politics,
“is what we think of his ‘public image.’”
The Kennedy-Nixon debates, he said,
offered “specious” drama that did noth-
ing to convey “which participant was
better quali½ed for the presidency.”

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They raised the peripheral matters
of lighting, makeup, and Nixon’s ½ve-
o’clock shadow to prominence while
“reducing great national issues to triv-
ial dimensions” and squandering “this
greatest opportunity in American his-
tory to educate the voters.”

Boorstin also elaborated what he saw
as the dangers of the rise of this image
culture: nothing less than the demise of
representative government. Hearkening
back to Lincoln, he said that the maxim
“you can’t fool all of the people all of
the time” was “the foundation-belief of
American democracy.” It implied, ½rst,
that the citizenry can distinguish “be-
tween sham and reality,” and, second,
“that if offered a choice between a sim-
ple truth and a contrived image, they
will prefer the truth.” But in the face of
pseudo-events like the Great Debates,
Boorstin argued, this assertion no lon-
ger held. The cornerstone of the Amer-
ican temple was shaky.12
It took sixteen years for the stars to

align to permit another round of gen-
eral-election debates. In 1976, Jimmy
Carter, a relatively unknown former
governor, needed the debates even
more badly than Kennedy had in 1960,
to prove that he had presidential stat-
ure. And whereas previous incumbents,
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon,
had concluded that going mano a mano
could only elevate their rivals, Gerald
Ford, having been elected to neither
the presidency nor the vice presidency,
concluded that he, too, needed to sub-
mit himself to a vetting of sorts by the
public.

The 1976 debates are remembered
far less well than the 1960 contests.
Two episodes above all endure in pop-
ular memory. One is the audio failure
that occurred near the end of the ½rst
match-up, on September 23, resulting

in an awkward twenty-seven-minute si-
lence in which the candidates stood still
like mannequins. The other is Ford’s
statement in the second encounter that
Eastern Europe was not under Soviet
domination. Both moments exposed the
fallacy of thinking about the debates
as simply the candidates’ unmediated
statements and performances during
the broadcasts proper. Rather, it came to
be recognized, those performances be-
longed to a larger context that included
how the candidates and the race were
portrayed beforehand; how the partici-
pating journalists acted during the de-
bate; and the whole post-debate battle
for interpretation. “Starting with the
Ford-Carter matches,” Alan Schroeder,
a scholar of presidential debates, has
written, “a live debate has come to rep-
resent only the centerpiece of the larger
media marathon that begins weeks be-
fore airtime and ends well after the pro-
gram fades to black.”13

In retrospect, the audio failure seems

the more remarkable of the two inci-
dents. At 10:51 p.m. Eastern time, as
Carter was speaking, a technical failure
crippled the sound system. In the inter-
im, no one knew what to do. The mod-
erator, Edwin Newman, suggested that
the candidates sit down, but they didn’t.
Nor did they approach each other to chat
informally. Instead they stood rigidly
and silently at their respective podiums.
This spontaneous mutual non-aggres-
sion pact became an emperor-has-no-
clothes moment, underscoring the fear
of spontaneity that had infused the de-
bates. As much as anything, it revived
the thread of criticism that had greeted
the Kennedy-Nixon contests: that they
were not real debates, requiring quick-
wittedness and an active intelligence,
but joint press conferences, packaged
and rehearsed, short on the substance
they were supposed to deliver. The si-

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Dædalus Spring 2009

David
Greenberg

lence, wrote the editors of The New Re-
public, “was prima facie evidence, if any
were needed, that the debates are not a
news event merely available for coverage
by the networks; rather they are produc-
tions staged for their bene½t and even,
despite their loud grumbling, to their
speci½cations.” As a result, the maga-
zine complained, no real give-and-take
occurred; no “inspiring visions” were
articulated, only talking points. “From
Mr. Ford’s ½rst response . . . to Carter’s
last, the candidates delivered what they
were programmed to deliver.”14

Comments like these about the de-

bates, and those from The New York
Times cited earlier, were widespread,
and they recurred like clockwork in the
following years. The laments about im-
age superseding substance were fueled,
moreover, by a new attention to the de-
bates’ backstage maneuverings. Candi-
dates began to hold practice debates,
with aides and other supporters playing
the roles of the opposing candidates,
and the press started reporting on these
preparations with clear delight. Journal-
ists got excited, too, when in 1983 Lau-
rence Barrett, a Time magazine reporter,
disclosed in a book that Ronald Reagan’s
campaign had gotten hold of Jimmy Car-
ter’s brie½ng book before one of their
1980 debates.15 Though scandalous as a
clear-cut violation of the norms of fair
play, the subterfuge also caused discom-
fort for another reason: like the prolifer-
ating reports about debate preparation,
“debate-gate” underscored the practiced
nature of the performances and further
dispelled any illusion of spontaneity sur-
rounding them.

As viewers ½gured out that the debates
didn’t really begin when the program it-
self came on tv, they also came to real-
ize that the debates didn’t end with the
candidates’ closing statements either.

The fallout from Ford’s remarks about
Eastern Europe showed, more than any-
thing else, the importance of the post-
debate instant analysis and spin. As a
substantive matter, the president’s com-
ments hadn’t been terribly confusing or
controversial. In context, his intent was
clear enough–a desire not to write off
Eastern Europeans’ aspirations for free-
dom from Soviet influence–and, ac-
cording to polling, most viewers didn’t
deem them an error. Some surveys taken
that night even showed a plurality of re-
spondents believing that Ford had out-
performed Carter. The incident mat-
tered, however, as an illustration of how
the debates burst the time limits of the
actual broadcast. Despite the public’s
indifference to Ford’s comments, tele-
vision and newspaper pundits seized
on them as if he had made a horrendous
blunder. At his press conference the next
day, the ½rst eleven questions dealt with
the purported gaffe. Carter harped on
it in his own appearances. Soon polls
showed that the public had adopted the
journalists’ view. “I thought that Ford
had won. But the papers say it was Car-
ter. So it must be Carter,” one voter was
quoted as saying–ironically, maybe, but
not without reinforcing the point about
the importance of post-debate commen-
tary.16

Post-debate spin was mostly new in
1976. In 1960, neither party had tried
to shape anyone’s verdicts about the
debates. Both camps simply said their
men had done well, but their tone was
restrained and not opportunistic. “Some
Kennedy aides, asking not to be quoted,
said they felt their candidate had scored
more points and over-all had made the
best impression,” The New York Times
noted.17 Kennedy did use unflattering
clips of Nixon sweating and scowling
in a television advertisement, but that
move was aimed at taking advantage

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of an already-clear public verdict, not
at influencing the verdict.

By 1976, the candidates’ handlers had
gotten cannier. After the ½rst vice presi-
dential debate that year, between Bob
Dole and Walter Mondale, the Republi-
can ticket conscripted three Dole sup-
porters–his wife Elizabeth, Texas Gov-
ernor John Connally, and Vice President
Nelson Rockefeller–to praise Dole’s
performance; each appeared on each
of the three tv networks. The practice
grew apace. By 1988, journalists were
referring to “Spin Alley,” a corridor of
the debate site where staffers argued
shamelessly why their man had pre-
vailed, whether they believed it or not.18
The candid acknowledgment of “Spin
Alley” dispensed with the pretense that
the debate analysts were offering objec-
tive or even sincere analysis. Reporters
knew they were getting a deliberately
partisan take, yet they quoted their
sources anyway and happily passed it
all on to their audiences with the stark
disclaimer that it was all “spin” for the
home viewer to sort out. Not only the
journalists and the spinners, but the au-
diences, too, were presumed to agree
that what mattered as much as the de-
bate performances was the subsequent
effort to shape perceptions of the out-
come and of the candidates.

Given this incessant attention to the

staging and spinning of the debates,
complaints about their hyperscripted
character multiplied. In 1988, for ex-
ample, New York Times columnist A. M.
Rosenthal raged about the vapidity of
the vice presidential match between
Democrat Lloyd Bentsen and Republi-
can Dan Quayle. “It was not a debate,”
Rosenthal insisted. “It was not even a
good news conference. It was a staged,
manipulated, choreographed perform-
ance, stilted and arti½cial. At the end
the most important question remained

unanswered.” Like so many others, Ros-
enthal (who, it should be said, has been
described as writing like Peter Finch’s
anchorman in Network, “as if he were
shouting from the ½re escape”) saw the
debate as emblematic of politics in the
age of tv and mass media. The entire
campaign, Rosenthal said, took place
not “between two sets of candidates but
opposing teams of political packagers,
script writers, handlers, spinners, and
sound-bite artists.” Two years later, no
less a personage than Walter Cronkite,
in delivering (½ttingly) the ½rst annual
Theodore White lecture at Harvard’s
Kennedy School of Government, made
a similar pronouncement. “The debates
are part of the unconscionable fraud that
our political campaigns have become,”
he said. “Substance is to be avoided if
possible. Image is to be maximized.”19
Even as it became a cliché to decry

the debates’ failure to carry out their ap-
pointed democratic function, however,
there remained a concurrent strain of
commentary that regarded the debates
as a useful exercise in public education.
Though not dominant, this strain of
commentary wasn’t hard to ½nd either.
In The Making of the President, 1960,
White had spoken of television as hav-
ing the properties of an X-ray, magical-
ly revealing a politician’s inner self.20
Though ridiculous as a scienti½c prop-
osition, this was a felicitous metaphor,
and one convenient for those who
wished not to take too dim a view of
the modern political tv dramas like
the debates. Much like photographs
are often assumed (wrongly) to cap-
ture “reality” as words cannot, the
X-ray view of tv imagined the tube as
a transparent medium: a medium that
doesn’t mediate. Implicit, too, in this
notion was a trust in the judgment of
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David
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with the Enlightenment faith in human
reason. At the end of the day, went this
argument, people could put aside the
spin and stagecraft and arrive at sound
judgments.

Remarkably, this determination
to vindicate the tv debates often
coexisted snugly alongside the sharp
criticisms. In the same 1976 editorial in
which it spent six paragraphs ruing the
Ford-Carter debates as a poor progeny
of Lincoln-Douglas, The New York Times
concluded, without a shred of evidence,
“Character, integrity, compassion, intel-
ligence–or lack of them–do have a way
of showing through.” In the same vein,
Joe Duffey, an adviser that year to Jimmy
Carter, told the Times in a separate news
article: “Character is what I think is ½-
nally displayed. It’s either there or it
isn’t, and television is a great revealer.”21
In 1980, Daniel Henninger, writing in
the Wall Street Journal, deepened the ar-
gument on behalf of the debates’ intrin-
sic value. He praised the opportunity to
see Carter and Reagan relatively un½l-
tered, speaking live and without a script
(or at least not a literal script). “Televi-
sion, in formats like Tuesday’s debate, is
nicely suited to passing democratic judg-
ment in this country,” Henninger noted.
“It provides unimpeded and thorough
access to the ideas and opinions of men
and women in public life.” Compared
to the evening news, in which “images
rush by [and] the on-camera reporter
intrudes, pressing his opinion, flattening
mine,” the debates did indeed provide a
rare opportunity to take the measure of
two men; one could ignore the pre- and
post-debate hullaballoo and fall back on
one’s own impressions of the candidates
going head to head.

From a slightly different angle, the po-

litical analyst Jeff Green½eld also sang
the praises of debates when he wrote of
the 1988 match-ups between George

Bush and Michael Dukakis. Green½eld
also praised the contests as revealing,
though he departed from Henninger in
that he saluted the role of the question-
ing journalists as a bene½cial ingredient
in the mix. “The much-maligned format
produced the most signi½cant glimpses
we have had into the thinking and char-
acter of the candidates since the general-
election campaign began on Labor Day,”
he wrote. Suggesting that the journalist-
interrogators made the format more il-
luminating than a true Lincoln-Douglas
encounter would have been, Green½eld
said that the candidates’ responses to
questions about criminal penalties for
abortionists and Dukakis’s bloodless
demeanor gave viewers useful data for
forming judgments. In contrast, letting
the candidates say whatever they pleased
would have given us “programmatic
formulations of speechwriters such as
Peggy Noonan and Robert Shrum.”22
The pro-debate argument–that the

contests elicit some important qualities
in the candidates–is not wholly wishful.
Some viewers certainly glean from them
some information that they ½nd useful.
But they do so mainly because most of
these viewers don’t follow political af-
fairs as intensively as journalists or news
buffs, and as a result they learn elemen-
tary information about a candidate–
that he supports universal health care or
a balanced budget, for example–for the
½rst time. These viewers don’t mind that
the candidates are regurgitating phrases
they’ve used umpteen times before; the
phrases are new to them. It shouldn’t be
surprising that voters claim to ½nd the
debates helpful in deciding how to vote.
But that doesn’t vindicate the debates.
That debates may serve as a convenient
source of easily discoverable news hard-
ly justi½es their existence. Newspaper
and magazine articles, tv news seg-

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ments, and countless other journalistic
outlets provide the same information,
and much more; it’s just that many
debate viewers don’t pay much heed
to those sources. In 2008, after the sec-
ond encounter between Barack Obama
and John McCain, reporters for Nation-
al Public Radio’s Morning Edition inter-
viewed undecided voters. “After watch-
ing these debates, I’ve become more
undecided,” said a woman named Mar-
tinique Chavez. “I think that I need to
wait till another debate and see and
learn more of the facts.” But of course
Ms. Chavez did not have to wait for
anything to learn more facts. She could
have easily turned to a huge trove of
newspaper and magazine articles, or
the candidates’ comprehensive web-
sites, for far more detail than she could
ever get in ninety minutes of tv.23
Nor does the fact that the debates
sometimes sway dithering voters justi-
fy the conclusion that these voters are
acting as democratic theory prescribes.
On the contrary, if they’re ignorant
about the candidates going in, they’re
more likely to be seduced by clever
or disingenuous statements in the de-
bates–or by a winning smile, poised
delivery, or snappy one-liners hatched
weeks earlier. Anyone who paid atten-
tion to the focus groups convened by
the networks to watch the 2000 debates
between George W. Bush and Al Gore
had to come away at least a bit uneasy
about the public’s capacity for critical
thinking. On cbs, one Sandra Harsh
said she was influenced by what she
saw. “I was very impressed with Bush’s
speci½cs, his points of–of his program,
what he planned to do,” she said. “I like
–I liked the line about trusting people,
not the federal government. I liked his
format for national health care. I–I
think he showed himself as the superi-
or candidate.”24 Not to be too harsh

on Sandra, but if viewers who turned
on the debate that night had never be-
fore heard Bush recite his mantra about
trusting the people, not the government,
or came away thinking that he would im-
plement a national health-care plan, it
should give us pause about the debates’
value in helping undecideds decide.

It’s comforting to think that the de-
bates disclose telling qualities about
a candidate, whether it be Dukakis’s
sangfroid in 1988, Bush’s indifference
to people’s struggles when the camera
caught him looking at his watch in 1992,
or Gore’s superciliousness when he
was roasted for high-decibel sighing in
2000. And surely it’s proper for voters
to consider the candidates’ personal
qualities, even super½cial ones, along-
side their records and their stands. All
viewers have subjective criteria of what
kind of politicians they like and dislike,
and watching the candidates in a debate
can help us gauge our own comfort lev-
el with them as television presences.
But whether the speci½c personal traits
on view in the debates should matter to
the same degree that they’re exhibited
in a single performance or commented
upon by the talking heads is totally spec-
ulative and highly dubious. Ultimately,
the idea that debates give people the in-
formation they need to make a sound
choice–whether about issues or about
personal qualities–has to be seen large-
ly as the expression of a wish. It may be
true sometimes, but we don’t have posi-
tive grounds for believing it to be true,
and we have reason to doubt it as well.

Still, if the debates can’t be said to

serve the autonomous modern citizen,
coolly assessing the candidates on the
issues, they shouldn’t be disdained en-
tirely either. For while the debates have
obvious flaws and could certainly be im-
proved, the ultimate problem isn’t the

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debates themselves; it’s the assumptions
we take to them–speci½cally the idea
that their value resides in the informa-
tion they supply.

The late communications scholar
James Carey once proposed a distinc-
tion between what he called a transmis-
sion view of communication and what
he called a ritual view. The transmis-
sion view is the one with which most
of us usually operate. It holds that the
purpose of communication–of which
presidential debates are of course one
form–is to impart information. It hard-
ly needs more elaboration than that. The
ritual view, in contrast, is, according to
Carey, “a minor thread in our national
thought.” On this view, he wrote, com-
munication is “directed not toward
the extension of messages in space but
toward the maintenance of society in
time; not the act of imparting informa-
tion but the representation of shared
beliefs.”25

It may make sense to conceive of the

presidential debates as rituals rather
than as transmitters of information.
They are, after all, rites like holidays
or parades, which gain meaning from
the way they ½gure in our daily experi-
ences. They may not educate, but they
evoke feelings, bolster sentiments, and
provoke action. Debates bring pleasure
to following campaigns. They bind us
together socially with our compatriots.
They can even trigger political involve-
ment. In this context, Frank Stanton–
and indeed all of us–have had it back-
ward: the debates matter not because
they differ from the rallies and torch-
light parades of bygone times, but be-
cause they resemble them.

Thinking of a debate as a ritual, more

than as a source of information, also
helps explain certain riddles. Why, for
example, have presidential candidates
since 1976 never declined to participate?

One possibility is the fear that the nay-
sayer would be called a coward, and it
is true that in fall 1992 the elder George
Bush was drawn into televised argu-
ments on the campaign trail with a
man dressed as a large fowl who taunt-
ed “Chicken George” for shrinking
from debates with Bill Clinton. But a
candidate ahead in the polls could easi-
ly choose to weather such taunts if the
advantages seemed great enough, or to
demonstrate courage in another way.
The harder obstacle to overcome seems
to be that declining to spar would now
be seen as neglecting a civic duty–like
failing to put your hand on your heart
at the playing of the national anthem
or not showing up for the president’s
State of the Union address. Debates
draw strength from their status as im-
portant rituals.

Or consider another riddle: if the
debates exist to inform the undecided,
why do so many viewers tune in who
already have their minds made up?
The transmission model makes these
viewers superfluous. Yet for many
such people, watching the debates is
a beloved pastime. Admittedly, I’m
something of a political junkie, but I
often ½nd myself over at a friend’s
apartment watching the encounters
with a small group, all of us cheering
on our candidate. The act of partic-
ipating in such a shared experience
renews our political commitment
and excitement. And this is an old
tradition. There were debate-watch-
ing parties in Democratic and Repub-
lican clubs back in September 1960;
Jackie Kennedy hosted one in Hyan-
nisport, where Archibald Cox, Arthur
Schlesinger, and assorted politicians,
family members, and journalists gath-
ered over coffee and pastries to watch
the tanned and polished jfk on a rented
sixteen-inch portable tv set.

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Even for those who are genuinely un-
decided, the debates may perform this
kind of ritual function, too. Starting in
1992, the National Communication As-
sociation and the Commission on Pres-
idential Debates set up a project called
Debate Watch to bring together citizens
in local communities to watch and dis-
cuss the contests. Although the results
are too inconclusive to allow for con½-
dent generalizations, they seem to sug-
gest that joining in these colloquies
spurred people to vote on Election Day.
At the least, they appeared, as one schol-
ar of the project noted, to “engage vot-
ers in the ideas, perspectives, and con-
cerns of others in their communities.”
According to The New York Times, “par-
ticipants lauded the sheer experience
of post-debate discussion as much as
the debates, bonding like jurors with
other panel members and compound-
ing their appetite for politics.” Diana
Carlin, a scholar involved with the ef-
fort, declared, “This is creating a sort
of civic discourse that I don’t think
takes place in this country”–a claim
that might be hyperbolic but nonethe-
less hints at some ground-level value
derived from the contests.26

Evidence that the debates achieved
this less lofty but more realistic goal
dates back to 1960. “The tv medium
in the past has been legitimately criti-
cized for injecting too much show busi-
ness into areas where it is not appropri-

ate,” wrote New York Times television
critic Jack Gould after the ½rst Kennedy-
Nixon debate. “But last night the net-
works demonstrated the civic usefulness
of the broadcasting media.” A few days
later he built on his observation. “Over-
night, as it were,” he wrote, “there was
born a new interest in the campaign
that earlier had been productive only of
coast-to-coast somnolence.” Even Ted-
dy White agreed that the debates man-
aged to “generalize this tribal sense of
participation . . . for the salient fact of
the great tv debates is not what the
two candidates said, nor how they be-
haved, but how many of the candidates’
fellow Americans gave up their evening
hours to ponder the choice between the
two.”27

The choreography and sound bites
that constitute the presidential debates
should be recognized as unreliable and
inadequate methods for casual voters
to get the facts about the nominees. But
the experience of watching debates, per-
haps in groups, or in discussing them
“the next morning,” as Gould wrote,
“in kitchen, of½ce, supermarket and
commuter train” has value.28 In an age
of desiccated politics, when too many
citizens feel adrift and overburdened
in trying to judge complex policy issues
for themselves, this experience serves,
in some quiet way, to thicken our com-
mitments to political life.

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ENDNOTES
1 Transcript of Palin-Biden debate, posted on October 3, 2008; available at http://www
.cnn.com/2008/Politics/10/02/Debate.transcript/ (accessed December 1, 2008).
2 Michael Kinsley, “A Gaffe Is When a Politician Tells the Truth,” The New Republic, June 18,
1984; reprinted in Kinsley, The Curse of the Giant Muf½ns: And Other Washington Maladies
(New York: Summit Books, 1987), 272–275.

Dædalus Spring 2009

David
Greenberg

3 “Lights–Camera–Candidates!” The New York Times, September 24, 1976.
4 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New
York: Viking, 1985), 44–49, 79.
5 Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: Free Press,
1998), 143.
6 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.:
mit Press, 1981), 211.
7 Frank Stanton, “A cbs View,” in The Great Debates: Kennedy vs. Nixon, 1960, ed. Sidney
Kraus (1962; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 65–72.
8 Fawn M. Brodie, Richard M. Nixon: The Shaping of His Character (New York: W.W. Norton,
1981), 427.
9 Memorandum from Louis Harris, in the Robert F. Kennedy Papers, Political Files, Box 45,
John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

10 Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1960 (New York: Atheneum, 1961), 348;
Ralph McGill, “tv vs. Radio in the Great Debate,” Washington Evening Star, October 1,
1960, quoted in Alan Schroeder, Presidential Debates (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000), 176; Michael Schudson, “Trout or Hamburger: The Politics of Telemytholo-
gy,” in The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); David L.
Vancil and Sue D. Pendell, “The Myth of Viewer-Listener Disagreement in the First
Kennedy-Nixon Debate,” Central States Speech Journal 38 (1987): 16–27; Broadcasting 59
(1960): 27–29.

11 Douglass Cater, “Notes from Backstage,” in The Great Debates, ed. Kraus, 130; Samuel

Lubell, “Personalities vs. Issues,” in The Great Debates, ed. Kraus, 152.

12 Daniel Boorstin, The Image; or, What Happened to the American Dream (New York: Athe-

neum, 1961), 204, 41–43, 36.

13 Schroeder, Presidential Debates, 173–174.
14 “Packaged Politics,” The New Republic, October 9, 1976.
15 Laurence I. Barrett, Gambling with History: Ronald Reagan in the White House (New York:

Doubleday, 1983); Phil Gailey, “Baker and Stockman Report Receiving ’80 Carter Materi-
al,” The New York Times, June 24, 1983.

16 Larry J. Sabato, Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics

(New York: Free Press, 1991), 127–129; voter quoted in Doris Graber, Processing the News:
How People Tame the Information Tide (New York: Longman, 1984), 264, and in Thomas E.
Patterson, Out of Order (New York: Knopf, 1993), 57.

17 Schroeder, Presidential Debates, 181.
18 The ½rst printed references I’ve found to this term were in Steven Komarow, “Protocol
Takes a Powder as Senators Beat Up on Colleagues,” Associated Press, October 6, 1988;
and Christine Chinlund, “Spin Doctors Swing into Operation,” The Boston Globe, October
14, 1988.

19 A. M. Rosenthal, “The Bentsen-Quayle Whatever,” The New York Times, October 7, 1988;
James Wolcott, “Hear Me Purr,” The New Yorker, May 20, 1996; Cronkite quoted in Tom
Wicker, “Improving the Debates,” The New York Times, June 22, 1991.

20 White, The Making of the President, 347.
21 “Lights–Camera–Candidates!”; James M. Naughton, “The Debates: A Marketplace in

the Global Village,” The New York Times, September 26, 1976.

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22 Daniel Henninger, “The Great Debate and Electronic Democracy,” Wall Street Journal, Oc-
tober 30, 1980; Jeff Green½eld, “There’s No Debate: The Format Works,” The New York
Times, October 13, 1988.

23 “Undecided Voters Watch Debate In Albuquerque,” Morning Edition, National Public

Radio, October 8, 2008 (accessed via Lexis/Nexis, October 14, 2008).

24 Phil Jones, Transcript, “Focus Group Gives Their [sic] Views of the Presidential Debate,”
cbs News Transcripts, October 17, 2000 (accessed via Lexis/Nexis, February 29, 2008).
25 James W. Carey, “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” in Communication as Culture:

Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 14–15, 18.

26 Francis X. Clines, “‘Ask Not . . .’ ‘. . . Military-Industrial Complex . . .’ ‘. . . but Fear It-

self . . .,’” The New York Times, September 23, 1996; Barbara A. Pickering, “The American
Democracy Project at Work: Engaging Citizens in Argumentation,” Argumentation and
Advocacy 42 (Spring 2006): 220, 222; Christina Nifong, “Efforts to Engage Voters via Po-
litical ‘Tupperware Parties,’” Christian Science Monitor, October 16, 1996.

27 Jack Gould, “tv: The Great Debate,” The New York Times, September 27, 1960; Jack Gould,
“The ‘Debate’ in Retrospect,” The New York Times, October 2, 1960; White, The Making of
the President, 352.

28 Gould, “The ‘Debate’ in Retrospect.”

The presi-
dential
debates as
political
ritual

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Dædalus Spring 2009

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