Bush Debates Attending Town Hall

According to recent news reports, the Bush campaign is attempting to reduce the number of debates the President has with John Kerry from the three proposed by the Commission on Presidential Debates to only two. More specifically, they are attempting to eliminate the town hall style debate scheduled for October 8 in St. Louis.

Let us put aside the strong possibility that the Bush team's negotiating position has been constructed with an eye toward convincing reporters that Bush is afraid to debate Kerry, thus lowering expectations for the president and raising them for Kerry. If there is one debate that the president would rather skip, it's the town hall, because it calls Bush to do the things he is least capable of: responding to unpredictable questions, talking about a wide range of issues, and addressing the day-to-day concerns of real people. And it would be a shame, because the town hall is far and away the most entertaining and edifying format.

The town hall debate originated in 1992, when with the assistance of Gallup the Commission on Presidential Debates gathered a group of undecided voters in Richmond, Va. to quiz George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot about their positions and personalities. The format was perfectly suited to Bill Clinton's skills; he understood that viewers at home could connect with him by watching him connect with ordinary people. In what would become the debate's signature moment, President Bush found himself unable to answer a voter's question about how the national debt had affected him personally. Staying close to his podium, Bush struggled to figure out what she meant, finally saying with an awkward smile, "I'm not sure I get – help me with the question and I'll try to answer it." When it came time for Clinton to rebut, he walked over to the woman, looked in her eyes, and said, "Tell me how it's affected you." The election was effectively over.

But apart from what it revealed about the candidates, the Richmond debate – and the similar ones held in 1996 and 2000 – proved themselves to be the best thing the Commission could offer voters, for a few reasons.

Power to the People

First, it turned out that ordinary citizens ask much better questions than journalists. The pre-1992 format, in which a panel of journalists would question the candidate, was dominated by efforts to play "gotcha" – with their brief moment on the national stage, reporters often asked candidates questions of the "Have you stopped beating your wife?" variety in hopes of creating a compelling slip-up. They also focused on process, with questions about campaign strategy and tactics.

But the voters assembled for the town hall debates have done nothing of the sort. To a fault, their questions have been substantive and practical, focusing on issues and asking candidates to elaborate their positions and specify what actions they will take as president.

For Bush, this presents a problem: it's one thing to brush off a reporter with yet another recitation of a talking point ("We're safer... Saddam was a threat... we're turning the corner..."), since most voters think reporters are cynics just trying to get the candidates to slip up. But doing the same thing to a voter asking for some real answers doesn't make you look clever, it makes you look rude. Bush knows how to stay "on message" as well as any president in history, a talent that serves him well in many situations. But a town-hall debate isn't one of them.

The second distinction of town hall debates is that citizen questioners tend to cover much greater ground than journalist questioners. While reporters – who travel and think in a giant pack most of the time – tend to focus on the few issues that are dominating the campaign, citizens have brought concerns to the town-hall debate that a Washington journalist might never have thought of. For instance, in the 2000 town hall debate, Bush and Gore fielded questions about national health insurance, FDA procedures for approving new drugs, education, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, military overstretch, the Brady Law, family farms, low turnout among young people, taxes, affirmative action and the death penalty. Both campaigns can predict fairly accurately what questions a journalist will ask them. But you can never tell what an ordinary citizen is going to bring up.