Debate season dawns. A writer’s task: Sift substance from sound bites.

Episode transcript

Ronald Reagan: I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS.]

[MUSIC FADES IN.]
Gail Chaddock: Political debates have produced iconic moments in American politics, from the seven epic Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, to the televised drama of Kennedy-Nixon five score and two years later, to the zingers that pass as takeaways in the debates of our times. This week marks the first presidential debate of the 2024 campaign season. 

[MUSIC]

Chaddock: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Gail Chaddock. We’re talking with Peter Grier, senior staff writer at The Christian Science Monitor, based in Washington for 44 years. Peter, thank you for joining us today. 

Peter Grier: It is nice to be here, Gail. 

Chaddock: You know, if we weren’t recording this podcast before Wednesday’s GOP primary debate, I could ask you now how to score that debate. Instead, let me ask you this: Do debates matter?

Grier: In general, debates don’t matter that much for presidential votes. Debates are important in inverse proportion to the importance of the office. So, for instance, in presidential debates, most voters know already who they’re leaning to vote for because of political polarization. But if you get down to, say, congressional seats, they may not know as much about members of congress, and so they learn more about the individual candidates.

Presidential primaries can have large fields of candidates. Voters may not know a lot about each one, and so there is an opportunity for a candidate to say something, or to act in a way that sticks in voters’ minds and makes them think more positively about them. Think of the Kamala Harris debate. 

Kamala Harris: Vice President Biden, do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America then? Do you agree?   

Chaddock: Can winning a debate win elections?

Grier: Losing a debate can lose elections. That is part of the problem for those who participate in them. So for instance, you can, as president Gerald Ford did, suddenly “free Poland” in a debate, accidentally saying it was a free country. 

Gerald Ford: There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.

Moderator: I’m sorry, could I just… Did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence....

Grier: And that can be a mistake that the press harps on. But that brings up a point in that it is often the press coverage of debates that matters more than the debates themselves. With Gerald Ford, the press hit on this as a means to say: “Well, Gerald Ford, a nice guy, not really up to the mental demands of the office.”

Chaddock: Interesting. Take the flip case, if a debate can kill someone, can a comment in a debate, make a career? 

Grier: Well, a comment in a debate can make a career, but it doesn’t necessarily win an election. For instance, in the vice presidential debate between Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle, Lloyd Bentsen had the well remembered line:

Lloyd Bentsen: I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.

Grier: I can quote it to you almost verbatim. Yet, of course, Lloyd Bentsen lost that election.

Chaddock: We know that some of the most celebrated zingers in these past debates were prepackaged and prepared. So if so much of this is prepared, what do we actually learn about politicians from watching them in a debate setting? 

Grier: Well, you can learn a lot. Often a debate will pin them down on a position, and they’ll say it in public perhaps for the first time. What can happen is that the answer will provide a baseline for them to actually act upon if they win. That’s an important side effect of debates and really one of their most substantive outcomes nowadays.

Debates can just be interesting studies of human behavior.  When I was a young reporter,  a lot of my friends worked in the government or worked in Capitol Hill, and we would sit around and watch them and we would play “debate.”  A question would come up and you know, we’d go: “Quick. You be Walter Mondale.” And so I would give what I thought would be Walter Mondale’s answer to that question. Somebody else would play Reagan. And it’s a fun way to kind of learn how politicians behave and how politicians speak. It’s hard to do what they were doing. They’re in public. There are bright lights, and people clapping and cheering, and some debate moderator peering down from on high. And it’s important to learn how a candidate would behave under such pressure. It isn’t necessarily the definitive reason to elect someone for president, but it’s certainly a useful skill to be able to handle yourself in a situation like that. 

Chaddock: Also speaks to stamina, another useful skill in the presidency. 

Grier: That’s why they have breaks. 

Chaddock: Are there any debates in recent American history that you see as especially significant?

Grier: I think some of the debates that former President Donald Trump has been involved in have been significant. They did sway at least a few votes. Much of that has to do with Mr. Trump’s behavior in them, as much as anything that he said. For instance, with both Hillary Clinton and with Joe Biden, he has physically followed them around the stage in a way that some people may have seen as an exertion of dominance, but many others saw as creepy. And I think that those did not help Mr. Trump.

Chaddock: Do you see debates as a good indicator of a candidate’s state of mind? In the example you just gave, some people may well have seen that stalking as some sort of indicator of state of mind, but in general, are debates a good way to understand state of mind?

Grier: I’d say not really. They’re good evidence of candidates’ performative skills. But I’m also a believer in the axiom that there is no such thing as authenticity in politics. There are only different levels of inauthenticity. In that sense, we’re not ever going to really know their actual state of mind. We know their public state of mind, the way they’d like to present themselves to the voters.

Chaddock: For the first time in American history, a presidential debate is overshadowed by criminal indictments of a leading candidate. What difference do you think these legal issues are making and how the Monitor covers these debates? 

Grier: It’s quite likely the only issue going forward into the general election is going to be whether former President Trump should go to jail. He’s very likely to be the Republican nominee. And he faces many counts of both federal and state charges. And he’s likely to be found guilty on at least some of those. The only way he really stays out of jail is by winning. At least on the federal charges. He might at least try to pardon himself.  I think that at least some of the candidates are sure to point out that his situation as a criminal defendant is going to be very difficult for the party to defend in a general election.  

Chaddock: Some Monitor readers support the former president. Are you hearing from them? 

Grier: Very much so. I hear from both sides. The ones who are for Trump, they send me many, many editorials from The Wall Street Journal. They want me to be editorial, in a way that supports their beliefs, but that’s difficult. Some of the stuff that they send me is also wrong. There are people who are not respectful, and who want me to say things that are false. And I refuse to do that.

Chaddock: Do you say that to people directly, either in the answers that you give, or in the way you craft your stories? Do you try to deal directly with an argument you think is wrong?

Grier: Part of the problem now is that things are so far apart that there are simply baseline assumptions that are different. So I can say that there was no election-changing fraud in the 2020 election, and I can use the shorthand description of why: many court cases were filed and lost. Many officials appointed by Trump told him that the election was in fact, fairly lost, and there was no fraud. But there are readers whose baseline assumption is that those points are wrong, and that therefore I am ignoring the fact that in fact there was widespread fraud. But I don’t have the space to get into that argument in every story. And that really baseline difference in beliefs is probably the thing that I get the most comments on.

Chaddock: Peter, how do you work toward balance in your own reporting?

Grier: Balancing today is a very difficult proposition, in the sense of ... it used to be easy, you could pick a Republican and quote them, and then you’d have a Democrat and you’d quote them. But the problem now is that there are many different axes of differences. So you could have a Republican and a Democrat, and the Republican cannot reflect a particular aspect of Republicanism nowadays: for instance, if they’re anti-Trump. And so you have to have a Democrat and then, an anti-Trump Republican, and then a pro-Trump Republican. And it all becomes extremely difficult to be thorough. You have to kind of pick how you’re going to juxtapose things. I try to write what I think is right.

Chaddock: You know, one of the most iconic debates of all wasn’t a presidential debate at all. It was for an Illinois Senate race. Why do you think Lincoln-Douglas became a standard against which we measure all other debates?

Grier: Well, the Lincoln-Douglas debates were debates in the sense that we don’t see at all today. They were, first of all, a closely coordinated series of events, occurring in towns throughout Illinois. And the degree of subtleties that they got into were far beyond anything that would happen today. They would talk about people’s positions on, say, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. They were a far more academic exercise than the kind of debates we see today, which really are just televised joint interviews.

Chaddock: Last question: were Lincoln-Douglas era voters better informed than those today?

Grier: It’s important not to look back at Lincoln-Douglas debates as some sort of nirvana of pure democracy. They were extremely well attended, of course, but a lot of people were drawn to it as entertainment. I’m sure there was lots of free food and drink, and it was a show that was a break from people’s lives. And I would say debates today are very similar in that sense. There are swooping graphics and breathless questions about will x defeat y. And that’s what draws a lot of voters. Yes, there can be serious discussions. But [they represent] an amalgam that really still today is in the great American tradition of politics.

Chaddock: Just different production values. 

Grier: Very different production values.

Chaddock: Peter, thank you for joining us for this podcast, and for your decades of writing for the Monitor. If I can add this, when I first came to the Monitor with no background in journalism, I asked someone how to write as a Monitor writer. And they said: “Write like Peter Grier.” Good advice. 

Grier: Oh, that’s nice and I’ve not heard that. 

[MUSIC]

Chaddock: I heard it a lot. And, thanks to our listeners. You can find more including our show notes with a link to the stories we discussed in this podcast at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Gail Chaddock, edited and produced by Clay Collins, Jingnan Peng, and Mackenzie Farkus. Alyssa Britton was our engineer with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.