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.

And this too is a problem for President Bush. To put it charitably, his facility with the details of the myriad policy issues a president confronts has its limits. The citizen questioners bring an unpredictability to debates that plays right to Bush's weakness. As we've seen time and again, when Bush is forced to think on his feet the results range from the comical to the embarrassing. While some issues may allow him to fall back on tried-and-true sound bites even if he doesn't really know what he's talking about, the chances Bush will be thrown a curve ball – and come out looking silly – are fairly high.

There may be another reason Bush doesn't want a town hall debate: the one in 2000 was his worst performance by far. Although the press didn't interpret it this way at the time, there may not have been a debate since the Bentsen-Quayle matchup in 1988 in which one candidate so clearly outclassed his opponent. Bush came across as uninformed, confused, and at times even self-parodying. He repeatedly said the opposite of what he meant – "If I'm the president, we're going to have emergency room care, we're going have gag orders... I'm not so sure 80% of the people get the death tax. I know this, 100% will get it if I'm the president." Asked by an audience member "How will your tax proposals affect me as a middle-class, 34-year-old single person with no dependents?" Bush gave an answer about Medicare. Answering a question about health care, he said, "Insurance, that's a Washington term." When Gore interrupted him in one back-and-forth exchange, Bush said petulantly, "There are certain rules in this that we all agree to, but evidently rules don't mean anything."

In part as practice for a town hall debate, President Bush has been conducting town-hall meetings as he campaigns across the country. But these events, like all Bush appearances, are carefully restricted lest anyone who doesn't support Bush slip through. The assembled supporters are given the opportunity to speak to the President, but they're as likely to heap praise on him as ask a question; one said, "Mr. President, I don't have a question, I have three thank-yous. One, thank you for your availability to serve. Two, your candle is burning brightly. And three, thanks for accepting the call and answering the call to work for what's right in the country and in the world." Not exactly hard-hitting – and nothing that would help him prepare for a real town-hall debate.

Rather than risk a repeat of his 2000 town hall performance, Bush is apparently trying to eliminate the town hall debate altogether. His representatives have said that their concern is that Kerry partisans could infiltrate the debate. But they're probably just as worried that Bush might encounter an actual undecided voter.

Bush is at his best in front of an adoring crowd, where he can lean forward, look resolute and deliver declarations he's repeated dozens of times before, safe in the knowledge they'll be greeted with thunderous applause. But in a town-hall debate, applause lines are greeted with a skeptical silence and evasion can prove costly. Bush's strengths will be of little use, and his weaknesses will be cast in high relief.

When Larry King asked Bush whether he runs into undecided voters on the campaign trail, Bush responded candidly, "The president generally doesn't run into anybody." That could be his biggest problem – and why he's afraid of whom he'd run into if he showed up in St. Louis.