A "Great Debate" Ingrate (me)

Marty Kaplan
The Huffington Post

It's surprising that 40 years passed between the Nixon-Kennedy debates in 1960, which won the largest viewing audience in television history until then, and the airing of the first season of "Survivor," a monster hit that launched the "reality" boom that's dominated television ever since. Those presidential debates were arguably the first reality show. What took so long for television executives to figure out that there's gold in them thar unscripted hills?

We speak with reverence about the Nixon-Kennedy debates, as though judging their outcome by whose 5 o'clock shadow looked worse on TV doesn't amount to Exhibit A of our susceptibility to stagecraft. We love recalling Ronald Reagan's putting away the age issue with a gag ("I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience"), as though his getting off a good joke were enough to undo our complicity in his subsequent cluelessness about Iran-Contra. We delight in noting how Al Gore's sighing, George H.W. Bush's looking at his watch and Michael Dukakis' unwillingness to bite Bernie Shaw's head off because of a hypothetical about his wife Kitty being raped, could well have lost them the White House, as though deciding presidential elections on "American Idol" criteria weren't an indictment of the shallowness of the media-political complex.

Yet we keep on insisting that how a candidate does in a presidential debate is a useful surrogate for how he would do as president. What was there about George W. Bush's opposition to nation building in the 2000 debates that could have enabled us to anticipate his aggrandizing freedom-on-the-march agenda? What was it in Dick Cheney's performance during the debates that could have prefigured the most arrogant flouting of the Constitution in the history of the Republic? For that matter, what was it that Bill Clinton said to Bob Dole in 1996 that might have forewarned us of the indiscipline and heartache to follow? Only hindsight makes any of those encounters illuminating.

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