Debates: Destined To Be Dull?

From the crowded press room, CBS News Correspondent Eric Engberg has seen his share of political debates. In this Reality Check, he reviews Monday night's performances by the Republican presidential hopefuls.

CNN and the Arizona Republican Party tried to get the candidates out of their canned, sound-bite spewing stump routines with format changes. It didn't work.

In the first part of the debate, CNN reporters simply asked the candidates questions with no chance to follow them up. The questions weren't especially wily or profound. The result was predictable.

CBS News Correspondent Eric Engberg

They all tried to be the good cop. Forget the sparks, it just wasn't very enlightening. Maybe next time they'll put the candidates in tic-tac-toe boxes like Hollywood Squares.

Nobody drew any blood. The front-runners won some modest victories:

• George W. Bush -- Aced a foreign policy pop quiz (whew!). Ambushed a month ago on world leaders by a TV reporter, Bush knew he would be tested again some day. Tonight, moderator Judy Woodruff sort of asked him -- nicely -- to back up his claim, made in the last debate, that he was reading a biography of the late Secretary of State Dean Acheson. What had he learned from Acheson? He had a plausible answer. Pass.

  Trying to establish his "compassionate conservatism," Bush declared that Republicans need to "hear the cries of people who are on the outskirts of poverty." As for those inside the border of povertyÂ…no mention. Maybe they're all Democrats.

• John McCain -- He wasn't in the room with the others, appearing from New Hampshire. Maybe that was enough for him to claim victory.

  The famous "temper and equilibrium" issue did not come up, evidence it has gone away. At times, McCain seemed in the zone...sounding articulate but un-canned.

We were assured "there won't be any more Nazi salutes in the public schools" in a Gary Bauer Administration.

Alan Keyes told us we are all "worse off than serfs." Bummer.

This raises the painfully obviou question, why invite guys who have no chance? Well, a tradition has developed over the years of permitting outlandish, snowball's-chance-in-hell candidates to have the same access to debates as the legitimate contenders. It didn't just start with Morrie Taylor (hint at who Morrie Taylor was: think tires) and Alan Keyes.

My favorite screwball candidate was a guy named Lar Daly from Chicago back in the 50's. He legally changed his middle name to "America First" and campaigned in an outfit festooned with stars and stripes. This brilliant strategy netted him exactly no victories in 40 campaigns for various public offices.

Despite that record of abject failure, Daly was able to convince the Federal Communications Commission that he was entitled to equal television time with the mayor of Chicago. That got everybody to thinking that if this still infant television medium was going to become as large a force for informing the electorate as it seemed, some of the old equal time laws needed to be changed. And they were, just in time for the legendary Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960. Still, the issue of eliminating the bottom-rung candidates from inclusion in pre-arranged political events like debates remains a sensitive one.

Martin Plissner, recently retired as CBS News Executive Political Director and author of Control Room, a history of TV and elections, says, "The problem has always been where do you draw the line? Who do you exclude?" Marty remembers how the Democrats decided on an open door debate policy in New Hampshire one year, and ended up with an unknown candidate emphasizing his debating points by swinging a toy rubber rat by the tail while the mainstream candidates sat in embarrassed amazement. (It's actually not a bad image, is it?).

On top of our tradition of openness, which is actually rooted in the original laws governing broadcasting, don't forget the institutional weakness of journalists, who often end up sponsoring the candidate debates and thus preparing the invitation lists. Journalistic organizations and the individuals who staff them quiver at the thought of being called "unfair." Even more terrifying -- being called "elitist." Capable of sending them into paroxysms of panic -- being called "enemy of the little guy." It doesn't take much imagination to see that such charges would be leveled by the excluded candidates.

Political parties are in the business of expanding, not contracting, their membership, so they tend to view the participation of a candidate with narrow appeal as an opportunity. In the case of the Republicans this year, Gary Bauer, who has never done well in the polls, has built much of his candidacy around his opposition to abortion rights. Republican activists -- even those who disagree with Bauer -- want to keep his stalwarts in the party. And they do not want to face the outcry that would come from those voters sympathetic to his ideas if he should be disinvited.
So don't think the pols are going to try to get rid of the bit players. "Snow White always has the seven dwarves," says GOP political consultant Alex Castellanos, who may have been voicing a conceptual conclusion or rendering a judgment on the current field. If the front-runner has opposition, Castellanos notes, it is to his interest to demand that all of them are present for the debate. "Having many is as good as having none," he concludes, noting a large group denies your principle opponent a mano a mano attack platform and lessens the chances some mistake you make will be memorable.

But Rich Bond, the former Chairman of the Republican National Committee, thinks his party is making a mistake. If Hatch, Keyes and Bauer had any chance of attracting enough supporters to win the nomination, they would have done so by now, he says.

Bond argues that by eliminating them from the last debate, "We could have doubled the time for the top three candidates. There would have been a sharper exchange, and they would have made some distinctions in their policy positions. All this would have helped the Republican candidate -- whoever he is -- let the voters know more about who he is."

The fringe candidates, meanwhile, are overjoyed to get the exposure. As Castellanos puts it, "Some are selling diet soda, some are selling vitamin-enriched punch, some are selling fizz water. Whatever, they're just happy to be up there on the same stage with Pepsi and Coke."

By Eric Engberg