“Did you feel depressed after your first practice debate?” asked the Tennessean.
“God, yes,” replied the man from Arkansas.
“I finished fourth in mine.”
In the last three decades, American presidential debates have evolved into a high-risk form of low political theater. The winner, more often than not, is determined by cosmetics (the darkness of Nixons jowl), offhand remarks (Reagan’s “There you go again”) and other factors of shining inconsequence. The chief imperative is Not To Say Something Dumb. On the positive side, this time, each of the three candidates had his goal. For Clinton, it was to make Bush look like an insensitive economic bumbler. The president, as his man Bob Teeter put it, had to “change this from a referendum on the times to a referendum on two people.” For Ross Perot, it was the perfect occasion to say nuts to both of them and to the creaky system of political gridlock they embodied.
Clinton girded for the first debate in Kansas City. Robert Barnett, a Washington lawyer who had played Bush twice before in debate preps for Geraldine Ferraro and Michael Dukakis, flew in for a third term; Rep. Mike Synar played Perot. The staff war-gamed the tactics of the other side. Bush had just started peppering Clinton with innuendoes about his trip to Moscow in 1970. It was so antique an exercise in Red-baiting that it puzzled Clinton as much as it offended him. An aide to Richard Gephardt, the House majority leader, came up with a neat riposte: Sen. Prescott Bush of Connecticut, the president’s late father, had himself taken a lead in fighting Joe McCarthy during the Red scare of the ’50s. “It will drive Bush crazy,” promised Stephanopoulos.
To the dismay of Clintons coaches, the candidate devoured his briefing books as if the prize would go to the man who could jam the most boring details into the least possible time. He grew so hoarse they had to bring in an emergency doctor. When Stephanopoulos walked into Clinton’s hotel suite that night, the candidate was wearing a makeshift bib and Hillary was spooning honey onto lemon slices for him to munch. The next day his voice cleared, and his answers came into crisp focus.
“What did you do to him last night?” asked Grunwald. “It’s like night and day from yesterday.”
Scanning a sheaf of papers, Hillary just smiled.
The final dress rehearsal went so well that the handlers began to worry that he would peak too soon. When the afternoon ofthe debate arrived, Clinton looked boyish, vulnerable, even a bit scared. Greenberg tried to pump him up. “People are thinking you will be president,” he said. “They want you to succeed. This is not a critical audience.” Then Clinton headed off to tog up for the real thing. “Bye, everybody,” he said. “You’ve been terrific. If I screw up, it won’t be your fault.”
Just before he went on, Carville and Stephanopoulos offered a final tip: don’t lose your temper. Blow up, Bush wins; stay cool, you do. And be prepared for anything. The Clinton team had practiced against the contingency that Bush might flourish a letter in which the young Clinton discussed renouncing his citizenship, though they insisted no such letter existed. “They’re signaling like crazy that they have something dramatic,” Carville warned his man. “But I think it’s a 75 percent chance they’re just playing mind games with us.”
For the Bush camp, caught on the wrong side of a double-digit gap in the polls, the debates were a crucial opportunity-and maybe the last. It was, Bob Teeter thought, as if the entire election were being put into a compressor; after more than a year of watching the candidates floating all over the landscape, the voters were about to get 360 minutes of them, force-fed via the tube. What Bush had to do was star in this political mini-series as the tall, quiet man in the White House who had brought the cold war to a close and Saddam Hussein to heel, all the time making Clinton look small. The issue was whom you could trust.
Compared with Clinton’s three-day boot camp, Bush’s preparations had all the rigor of a company softball game. He held what his coaches called pepper drills, several three-hour sessions in which everyone flipped through briefing books and tried to blow singles past one another. Then, the day before the first debate, Jim Baker held a more serious rehearsal in Room 450 of the Old Executive Office Building. Dick Darman, the budget director, played Clinton, a remarkable exercise in good sportsmanship since the president meant to fire him in a second term. He arrived with a pair of shades and a $9.99 saxophone from Toys “R” Us. John Sununu, already fired, turned up to play Ross Perot. He brought a pair of huge ears, but the joke paled and he soon discarded them. The two men fired their prepared lines at Bush; the president ad-libbed back. After about an hour, Baker stood up to stroke the whole team. “I’ve been through this many times,” he said. “This is the best first run I’ve ever seen.”
Well, yes and no. Some of the others thought the president had seemed tongue-tied: there had been no mistakes but a few incoherent answers. “Flawless, but completely unmemorable,” thought one coach gloomily. That wouldn’t be good enough. Clinton could play for a draw and win. The president had to hit a homerun, or go to his bean ball. Bush felt truly outraged by Clinton’s record of leading protests against U.S. Vietnam policy while he was living abroad. “Anybody have any doubts about my position?” he demanded after an extended tirade; nobody spoke up. A plan was hatched to equip Bush with what was thought to be “a real knockout line” on Clinton’s draft record. Bush would send Clinton a letter on the day of the debate demanding that he make good on his April 17 promise to release all his draft records. Then during the debate the president would announce what he had done-and challenge Clinton to come clean.
The handlers liked the idea, but Bush, worrying about op-ed types fussing over McCarthyism, decided the ploy would only worsen his press.
They worked over what they hoped would be the top of the news coming out of the debate: Bush’s announcement that Baker would take over as domestic czar during the second term, and that all top appointees would submit their resignations. The debate team wrote it on an index card so the president wouldn’t forget.
Roger Ailes dropped off some one-liners to aim at targets of opportunity: “There’s no statute of limitations on character” was one. “Governor Clinton is an expert on change: he’s changed his position several times on just about everything” went another. And when Clinton reeled off his first long skein of facts, Bush was to turn to the camera and say with an avuncular chuckle, “Last time I heard someone spout that many statistics, he was selling me a used car back in west Texas. It was a lemon.” And for Perot: “In the Oval Office, Ross, you can’t be a quitter.”
Finally, Bush climbed aboard Air Force One and flew west. On the flight he tried his used-car routine on Barbara. Not very presidential, she told him, so he dropped it.
Ross Perot got ready the way he did everything else: no frills. He flipped through a briefing book, perused some memos sent by friends, batted back questions lobbed by his staff. The day before the showdown at Washington University, he drove to the barber shop for a Norman Rockwell photo op. On the morning of the debate, he was up early riding his horse and playing with his grandchildren. When John Jay Hooker made a wish-you-luck phone call, Perot laughed at all the worry his rivals were going through to get credentials for aides and handlers. “Bush and Clinton don’t seem to have enough of them,” he said. “I’ll give them mine. I’m just going to take Margot and a couple other people who don’t have anything better to do.” No sweat.
When the three men finally stood facing one another, Bush seemed off balance. He mangled his announcement of Baker’s projected economic role, passing over the news so quickly no one could be quite sure what he meant. He neglected to mention that he’d be asking for resignations all around. In their holding area, the president’s top advisers exchanged worried looks. Clinton was scoring points. Before the debate, the Clinton team plotted to create what they called “moments,” incidents of collision meant to jar Bush and impress the audience. Stephanopoulos leaned toward the TV monitor in the Clinton holding room.
“This is it,” he muttered.
“Do your moment,” Paul Begala prayed.
Clinton delivered; the rehearsals paid off in a platinum sound bite. Looking toward the president, the governor said, “Mr. Bush, for 12 years you have had it your way; you’ve had your chance and it didn’t work. It’s time to change.” The Clintonites whooped.
Bush took his expected shot at Clinton for organizing demonstrations against his country. But Clinton was ready with a wall of antiaircraft fire. “Your father was right,” he said, “to stand up to Joe McCarthy. You were wrong to attack my patriotism.” Nonplused, Bush made the debater’s worst mistake: he said nothing. It would take him two days to find an answer.
To track the pulse of the electorate during the debate, Greenberg had organized dial groups of undecided voters. Now, as they registered their feelings, the needles shot upward, mainlining pure adrenaline into the Clinton people.
“We hit 90,” Stephanopoulos cheered as the dial groupers responded to Clinton’s defense of his experience for the presidency. Clinton’s numbers spiked again when he talked about creating jobs in Arkansas. The needles also moved up when Perot scored the evening’s best line-“I don’t have any experience in running up a $4 trillion debt.” When Perot talked about unemployment, he soared to 80, while Bush’s tepid promise (“We’ve got a plan”) depressed the dial-group needles into the 40s. “He’s done,” Greenberg said. “He’s gone.”
Watching the dials, Jack Maguire, a research consultant in Boston, thought Perot was like a jump jet: the others were slow on takeoff, he was built for speed. Over the course of the evening, Perot’s favorables, starting from 14 percent, rose by an incredible 58 points. When it was all over, Maguire’s dial group gave Perot first, Clinton second and Bush third.
Afterward, Clinton came offstage and told his debate coaches, “You guys were a lot tougher than Bush.” When the president returned, he said, “Boy, that guy is sure programmed.”
Two days later Bush was in the Oval Office getting ready for round two. Baker tried to buck up his old friend.
“You didn’t do badly,” he said. “We’ve got to make a few adjustments, but nothing major.”
The frustrated president waved a copy of NEWSWEEK. “Read these polls,” he said. “People say I got creamed. The people obviously don’t agree with you.”
By one of the season’s larger ironies, it was Dan Quayle who rallied Republican spirits with his performance two days later in Atlanta, According to the original Republican scenario, Bush was to “open the wound” in St. Louis “and Quayle was to open it wider.” Now that Bush had faltered, Quayle had to draw the first blood. After watching Bush, he told aides he thought the president should have been more aggressive.
The debate started as a mismatch. Gore was programmed to the max. For the first 10 minutes or so, in the one-word review of a Bush aide, the veep was pretty “dorky.” James Bond Stockdale, Perot’s running mate, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner and Vietnam POW, seemed a bit lost. “I’m out of ammunition,” he said at one juncture, and he looked for much of the evening like a kindly old owl that had somehow blundered into a video arcade.
Quayle had arrived with a weapon sharpened by his wife, Marilyn. During the debate prep she had told him, “You’ve got to use the phrase ’to pull a Clinton!” Now he unsheathed it. He ripped into Clinton as a tax hiker. He stabbed at him as a truth twister. At one point, when he told Gore to “lighten up, Al … Inhale”-a zinger prepared in advance-one Bush topsider grew so excited he accidentally reminded everyone that the veep was doing far better than the president the first time around. “Dye his hair and send him to Richmond,” shouted the suddenly happy camper. Quayle’s best moment came when he said Clinton lacked the honesty and character to be president-and Gore didn’t hit back. Later that evening, when commentators picked up on Gore’s slack defense, Clinton began to percolate. The next morning he felt quite steamed. Hillary was even more upset.
To prepare for the second presidential encounter-this one featuring a folksy, Donahue-style format-the Clinton team took up quarters in Williamsburg, Va., not far from the debate site in Richmond. Carville and Stephanopoulos arrived feeling dark. Clinton was hoarse again; he was saying, “I don’t have a feel for this one,” even though just such meet-the-people programs had served him well in New Hampshire. They all expected Bush to come barreling through the hole in the line opened by Quayle. “Man, we are headed toward one big showdown,” Carville told his assembled troops. “We are waiting for the T word: trust.”
Between skull sessions, Carville, Stephanopoulos and Greenberg took a walk on the grounds of the Williamsburg Inn. They had a new source of worry: Ross Perot. Perot was hurting them in the West and among young voters and college men elsewhere. He had halved their lead in Connecticut, and he was polling better than Clinton or Bush on handling the economy. “That’s awful,” Greenberg said. Carville thought Stockdale’s feeble performance in the debate had hurt Perot, but the new element of unpredictability was unsettling. The whole campaign seemed to be going flat. “It just doesn’t feel right,” he said. Quayle was blitzing the morning talk shows, and for the first time the Republicans seemed to be getting their free media and their attack ads to pull in tandem.
During the afternoon practice, Carville told Clinton: “The tax-and-trust thing is dangerous. It was clear what Quayle was told to do. The first chance you get, you smack him. And use the audience-make the audience your friend.” The new format had members of the audience, not journalists, asking the questions.
“You’ve got to,” Hillary agreed.
“Tone and body language are important,” Clinton said as he calculated the best fighting stance to take against Bush. “People know I’m not perfect. They want to know if I’m small or if I’m steady.”
A new CBS/New York Times poll had put Clinton 13 points ahead of Bush; nearly eight out of 10 voters were saying that Clinton’s antiwar protests didn’t bother them. “You think they can hold out two and a half weeks?” Clinton asked, an anxiety that nagged at all of them.
The next day Clinton’s allergies flared up, but he took a two-hour nap and woke up in a combative mood. “Let’s do it right now,” he told the people in his corner.
“Remember,” Carville said. “When he attacks you on trust, use your opening statement like a lawyer. He’s behind and he’s desperate.”
IN REALITY, THE PRESIDENT wasn’t looking foward to round two any more than Clinton was. Baker and Teeter had assumed Bush would like the talk-show format: he had done well in ask-George sessions. But from the beginning of his own rehearsal, he badgered his team with so many questions they thought he must be wondering who had let this crazy thing happen. Why, he asked, would the three candidates only have stools? Did he have to stand for 90 minutes? Would there be anything to write on? Why had they switched the time from 7 to 9 p.m.? Bush, who normally rises at 5, knew he would be fresher earlier in the evening. Stoically, the handlers had equipped him with a good one-liner from Ailes-“You cant turn the White House into the, Waffle House”-and a tardy reply to Clinton’s invocation of Prescott Bush. With those in hand, he ambled comfortably onto the stage.
What happened was a second disappointment for the Bush team. As the evening opened, moderator Carole Simpson invited members of the audience to tell the candidates how sick everyone was of hearing them talk dirt, not issues. The effect was to muzzle all three men’s attack lines, a clear plus for Clinton. Bush tried a negative volley or two, then backed away, losing his chance to follow through on what Quayle had begun.
The president’s worst moment came when a young black woman asked him how the national debt affected him personally. Bush seemed stumped. “I’m not sure I get it,” he said. Could you rephrase that? As he rambled on, the needles in Greenberg’s dial groups nose-dived toward the floor.
“Bush just lost the election,” Carville said as he studied the television screen. “Can you imagine if we had a candidate who did that? You’d be fanning me right now.”
Body language well prepared, Clinton moved in toward the young woman, established eye contact and talked warmly about how much pain the national debt caused in a small state like Arkansas, where the governor personally knew people who lost their jobs when companies went bankrupt. Clinton connected. Bush wound up saying Barbara would probably be a better president than he would, and looking at his watch. In a hotel suite on the road, Quayle watched the lost opportunity and put his head in hi,# hands. Why had Bush been so quiet? Afterward Bush told it confidant that going on the attack would have made him look unpresidential. “I really don’t like all this mud wrestling,” Bush said.
Exuberant, Clinton came offstage and told his people he thought he had been doing poorly until the deficit question came up. Then he thought, “Bush doesn’t get it.” And everything else got easier.
On their way to a late dinner, Clintons inner circle felt triumphant.
“This thing is gone,” Carville said.
“James, are you willing to say it’s sealed?” Stephanopoulos asked wickedly. Carville is notoriously superstitious. He once wore the same underwear 10 days in a row when the numbers of a client were going well.
“I’m not willing to say it,” he quickly replied. “But if you hooked me up to a thought meter. . .”
By the last debate, the president had run out of strategic options: he had to attack. He complained to Baker that his handlers had overprepped him. He scrapped a final rehearsal and flew off to Camp David to do his homework alone. His only sidemen this time were Baker and Ailes, the closest and most reliable of his political war-gamers. “Forget all the facts and figures,” said Ailes. “Just relax, listen to the debate and move to the offense as quickly as possible. You know what he’s going to say. When he does, come back down his smokestack.”
In East Lansing, Mich., site of the last debate, Clinton was having more allergy problems. After a long nap, he woke with a headache and went into the final debate prep feeling less than 100 percent. But then, there was no longer much to decide. If Bush hit him on the trust issue, he would poleax him. “No matter how hard I hit,” he told the handlers, “I have to come back to those 209 people in Richmond and say to Bush, ‘You still don’t get it’.” Drawing from the first debate, they decided to try for another killer “moment.” Clinton would ridicule Bush for saying he would put Baker in charge of the economy after January. Only one person would handle those chores on his watch: Bill Clinton.
With the eleventh hour at hand, Bush finally scored. He admitted past mistakes, but defended his stewardship and wrapped himself in the national honor over Desert Storm. He gnawed at Clinton’s character like a wolfhound after a leg of lamb. Out in the holding room, the Bush people were high-fiving and exchanging looks of vast relief. They fell silent when the governor, reaching for his “moment,” said: “The person responsible for domestic economic policy in my administration will be Bill Clinton.” For once, Bush took a hard serve and bashed it back. “That’s what worries me,” he retorted without a pause. It was his finest sound bite, the closest he came to “There you go again.” But it was too little, too late. A week later, one ofthe president’s closest advisers said out loud what they all knew: “He flubbed it. He just flubbed it. He flubbed so many lines. Do you want a list?”
The debates were over, and Bush hadn’t scored a single clear victory. But he did come away with a significant consolation prim. The numbers people reported that Clinton’s negatives were back on the rise, and the president had focused his campaign on the two words that had saved John Major: taxes and trust.
