Annoy the media...
Paul Waldman is right: Roger Simon's (no "L")'s fond rememberance of the Dukakis-Bush 1988 debate is gag-inducing, especially Shaw's sanctimonious view of himself as some sort of dragon-slayer.
Shaw, of course, famously asked Dukakis about whether he would reverse his stance on the death penalty if his wife Kitty was violently murdered. Dukakis foolishly failed to realize he was in fact at an audition for the high school play rather than a policy debate and was destroyed in the press for his lack of virility.
But the real kicker in Simon's account is what Shaw was apparently planning on asking Bush:
Shaw was in Washington and had gotten the call at 1:45 p.m. on a Tuesday that he was going to be the moderator for the Thursday night debate. So as he rushed out the door to catch a limo to Dulles Airport for the flight to Los Angeles, he grabbed a book on the Constitution.
On the ride to Dulles, he flipped through it and came upon the 20th Amendment, ratified in 1933, which declared that on Inauguration Day, if "the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become president."
That would be his question to Bush: If he were elected and died before Inauguration Day, how would he feel about Dan Quayle's becoming president?
With apologies to Bob Somerby, it's hard to imagine anything dumber -- or, frankly, easier for the candidate to answer. What was Bush going to do other than trot out the standard "I have complete confidence..." line he'd almost certainly spewed 1000 times by the time of the second debate? Meanwhile, the question itself was simply a straight-up "liberal-media" giveaway to the right (remember "Annoy the Media: Vote Bush" from four years later?). Quayle had been brought on to represent the social conservative old-fashioned-GOP-values wing of the party in contrast to the moderate "quiet man who hears the quiet people" Bush. Insulting his intelligence was (frankly, with some justification, given the mental midgetry of the people doing the insulting) tantamount in conservative ideology to blowing off the values he was on the ticket to represent.
Waldman says:
There's an unbroken line between Shaw, and Kit Seelye and Ceci Connolly making up lies Al Gore never told, and Jodi Wilgoren musing on John Kerry's windsurfing, and Maureen Dowd< writing about John Edwards' haircut, and on and on and on into this campaign and the next and the next. It's not about substance, and it isn't even about "character." It's about finding what reporters think is the worst thing about a candidate, and picking and picking at it until their evident belief that it should disqualify him from the presidency becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's nothing to be proud of, and if Bernard Shaw thinks there's some parallel between his brand of questioning and what Edward R. Murrow did, he's truly deluded.
Amen.
Shaw, of course, famously asked Dukakis about whether he would reverse his stance on the death penalty if his wife Kitty was violently murdered. Dukakis foolishly failed to realize he was in fact at an audition for the high school play rather than a policy debate and was destroyed in the press for his lack of virility.
But the real kicker in Simon's account is what Shaw was apparently planning on asking Bush:
Shaw was in Washington and had gotten the call at 1:45 p.m. on a Tuesday that he was going to be the moderator for the Thursday night debate. So as he rushed out the door to catch a limo to Dulles Airport for the flight to Los Angeles, he grabbed a book on the Constitution.
On the ride to Dulles, he flipped through it and came upon the 20th Amendment, ratified in 1933, which declared that on Inauguration Day, if "the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become president."
That would be his question to Bush: If he were elected and died before Inauguration Day, how would he feel about Dan Quayle's becoming president?
With apologies to Bob Somerby, it's hard to imagine anything dumber -- or, frankly, easier for the candidate to answer. What was Bush going to do other than trot out the standard "I have complete confidence..." line he'd almost certainly spewed 1000 times by the time of the second debate? Meanwhile, the question itself was simply a straight-up "liberal-media" giveaway to the right (remember "Annoy the Media: Vote Bush" from four years later?). Quayle had been brought on to represent the social conservative old-fashioned-GOP-values wing of the party in contrast to the moderate "quiet man who hears the quiet people" Bush. Insulting his intelligence was (frankly, with some justification, given the mental midgetry of the people doing the insulting) tantamount in conservative ideology to blowing off the values he was on the ticket to represent.
Waldman says:
There's an unbroken line between Shaw, and Kit Seelye and Ceci Connolly making up lies Al Gore never told, and Jodi Wilgoren musing on John Kerry's windsurfing, and Maureen Dowd< writing about John Edwards' haircut, and on and on and on into this campaign and the next and the next. It's not about substance, and it isn't even about "character." It's about finding what reporters think is the worst thing about a candidate, and picking and picking at it until their evident belief that it should disqualify him from the presidency becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's nothing to be proud of, and if Bernard Shaw thinks there's some parallel between his brand of questioning and what Edward R. Murrow did, he's truly deluded.
Amen.
2 Comments:
Dukakis lost the presidency that night, more's the pity. Especially since the question was a softball. The right answer would have been, "Killing would have been too good for him. I'd want to see him rot in jail for the rest of his life." This was the way Cuomo got away with his opposition to the death penalty, and it worked just fine.
I have to disagree with our host. The problem was not that it was a high school debate. People were watching the debates to see who Dukakis was as a person, to see if he, not just his ideas or policies, but he was fit for the presidency as they understand it. The problem was that Dukakis answered the question as though he did not understand that at all.
The winning answer would have been to attack the vicious stupidity of the question, then turn and answer the sincere and valid question in many people's minds: is someone who opposes the death penalty tough enough to be the leader of a nation in a world? Especially if that person is the candidate of a party widely perceived as understanding the nurturing functions well, but not the protecting functions.
In the same way, the reason that the Swift Boat attacks worked, even though Bush had no military record at all (other than evasion) was that whatever courage Kerry demonstrated in Vietnam, his response to the Swift Boating, although probably coming more from Boston Brahmin stoicism, made him look cowardly. "If he won't even stand up for himself, will he stand up for you?"
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