(crowd applauding) (tapping wood block)
- [Narrator] Televised presidential debates
have been an American political tradition
for the past 60 years,
but while they're far from perfect,
they're still beneficial to voters
as a means to learn about a candidate.
- That was locker room talk.
- [Narrator] What's more,
they can make or break an election,
so what, if anything, can be done to improve them?
- The candidates need no introduction.
- [Narrator] It's telling that the first ever
televised presidential debate in 1960
between candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy
remains famous not for what was said,
but for how each candidate looked.
- Senator Kennedy--
- [Narrator] Although Nixon and Kennedy talked extensively
about the big issues of the time,
like the Cold War and civil rights,
what is best remembered today
is each candidate's appearance.
- The Nixon-Kennedy debates in 1960
were actually the beginning
of the modern televised debate era.
There was actually four debates in 1960,
but what everybody remembers is the first debate
where Kennedy looked healthy
and Nixon looked sweaty and sick.
He paid a price for that, and what people remembered
was how they looked, not what they said.
- [Narrator] For better or worse,
the Kennedy-Nixon matchup set a precedent
of style over substance
that's only grown more prevalent in televised debates.
- What tends to be remembered from debates are moments,
and usually they're moments of gaffes or mistakes,
not high moments or great moments.
- [Narrator] That was the case with the next debate in 1976,
when President Gerald Ford faced off
against his Democratic challenger, Jimmy Carter.
- What Ford said really wasn't a gaffe.
It just sort of came out not the way he intended it to be.
- There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe
and there never will be under a Ford administration.
- What he said, essentially,
was the people of Poland don't consider themselves
to be subjugated to Soviet rule, and that was true.
The way it came across and the way it was portrayed,
unfortunately for him, was that he was naive.
He thought the Polish people weren't really
under the Soviet thumb when, in fact,
of course, in those days, they were.
That's, again, what everybody remembered from that debate,
and it didn't help him.
- You already are the oldest president in history.
- [Narrator] Poignant moments in a debate
can also help a candidate.
In 1984, Ronald Reagan famously put questions
about his age to bed with this quip.
- 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.
- In the first debate, Reagan didn't look all that good.
He looked a little old.
He was stumbling around a bit.
That produced some stories, including, ironically,
a famous one on the front page of the Wall Street Journal
that said the age factor has arisen,
so the Reagan campaign knew going into that debate
they had an age issue to deal with.
It did diffuse the age question
for the rest of that campaign.
- [Narrator] Modern debates also have
the added pressure of going viral.
- Sometimes debate moments that don't go well
can be not just bad, they can be almost fatal.
- It's three agencies of government
when I get there that are gone,
Commerce, Education, and the, uh,
what's the third one there, let's see.
- That was the case for Rick Perry in 2011
when he got halfway into a debate answer
and then couldn't remember the rest of it.
- The third one I can't, sorry.
(crowd chuckling) Oops.
- Or Mitt Romney's famous slipup in 2012.
- I went to a number of women's groups
and said can you help us find folks,
and they brought us whole binders full of women.
- [Gerald] He was trying to say that I have paid attention
to advancing women in my career,
I have a record of doing it, but it came across badly.
It came across in a way
that made it look as if women were nothing
but sheets of paper in a binder to him.
- [Narrator] Clearly, debates can have an effect
on the outcome of an election,
but what can be done to improve them?
- I think it's crucial when you're analyzing debates
to distinguish between primary season debates
and general election debates.
They're two quite different animals,
and I think, in my opinion,
one works way better than the other.
- [Narrator] Primary debates tend to be free-for-alls
where there's no particular format or formula
from one debate to the next.
- They tend to be sponsored by media organizations,
sometimes by state parties,
sometimes by combinations of all of the above.
- [Narrator] In contrast, the general election debates
are a bit more sober and controlled.
- General election debates are conducted
with the Commission on Presidential Debates,
which was established in 1987,
which has done this through eight presidential cycles
and which knows how to do it right
and in a distinguished way.
- [Narrator] One proposal
is to remove live studio audiences.
- And from the Wall Street Journal, Jerry Seib.
- Well, first of all, I've done three debates
with live audiences who are partisans,
and so I know what the atmosphere is like,
and it can be problematic.
It basically becomes a campaign rally to some extent,
and I don't think it's the ideal way
to hold a presidential debate.
- Hell yes, we're gonna take your AR-15, your AK-47--
- A smaller audience that is not filled
with campaign partisans is a better way to go.
- [Narrator] Another, at least for the primaries,
is to reduce the number of candidates on stage.
- A debate with too many candidates is very unwieldy.
It's hard to conduct a meaningful, substantive conversation
that follows a logical progression.
- We don't have time for tone--
- [Narrator] The biggest question
hanging over the 2020 debates
is the issue of President Donald Trump's participation.
- What President Trump has said
is that he thinks the Debate Commission
was unfair to him in 2016,
and he's not sure he's gonna agree to do
the three presidential debates that they have set up.
I think that would be a mistake.
I think it would be bad for the country,
bad for the campaign, bad for democracy.
It's easy to be critical of debates,
'cause they could be very messy
and they're not always perfect,
but when I think about debates, I think a little bit
about what Winston Churchill said about democracy.
He said democracy's the worst form of government
except every other form of government
that anybody's ever tried.
They can be messy, they're not perfect,
but they're a better way to get the candidates
to address voters and address each other
and address issues than anything else I can think of.
(pleasant orchestral music)