Candidates' Performances a Matter of Debate

Joe Lockhart was watching the instant feedback from focus groups during the final presidential debate four years ago, and the reaction showed that his candidate, John Kerry, was beating President Bush.

But strategist Matthew Dowd, who was in the Bush holding room, recalls his team's reaction to one Kerry answer: "We all looked at each other and said: 'We cannot believe he just said that. What a dumb thing to do.' " What the Democratic nominee had done was respond to a question about homosexuality by invoking the vice president's daughter Mary Cheney, and that soon dominated the media coverage.

"Over time, people forget what they actually saw, and it reshapes their memory of what happened in the debate," Lockhart says. "We knew that night that we'd won that debate. Two days later, after 48 hours of Mary Cheney, voters started revising their view."

It is a lesson that Barack Obama and John McCain would be well advised to study, whether they hold the first of three debates tomorrow in Mississippi or delay the session, at McCain's request, to deal with the Wall Street banking crisis. Performing well in these 90-minute face-offs, media and political analysts say, is only part of the battle. The moment each debate ends, the candidates, their aides and their surrogates will try to shape the coverage to their advantage. And if history is any guide, such full-court spinning can steal a victory after the clock has expired.

"It's always the gaffes that make the news at the debates," says Craig Crawford, a columnist for CQPolitics.com. "Sometimes they're real and sometimes they're manufactured. It's the gotcha mentality of our campaign coverage."

Says Dowd: "It's a postage-stamp way to describe it, something you'd tell your neighbor. But it only works if something happens during the course of the debate. You can't just create a new story line."

A simple mistake need not prove fatal. The blunder must feed an existing media portrait of the candidate in question.

"There will be long dissertations on 'Can Obama make an emotional connection with viewers? Why doesn't he talk in sound bites?' " says Walter Shapiro, Salon's Washington bureau chief. "There are going to be gimlet eyes looking at whether McCain fatigues in the last half-hour," as a way of judging whether he's too old for the job.

The post-debate coverage occasionally takes a sharp turn on its own. After the first Bush-Kerry debate, journalists spent days questioning what looked like a bulge in the back of the president's suit, sparking days of silly speculation about whether he was being fed answers through some sort of transmitter. When George H.W. Bush looked at his watch in 1992, when Michael Dukakis responded unemotionally in 1988 to a hypothetical question about the rape and murder of his wife, when Gerald Ford prematurely liberated Poland in 1976, no handlers needed to point out the mistakes and missteps.

But for Kerry to mention Cheney in arguing that gay people were born that way set off a GOP attack machine, led by the vice president and his wife, Lynne, both of whom said they were offended. The main New York Times news story did not mention the answer until the 27th paragraph. But the controversy grew so heated that 11 days after the debate, when Lockhart appeared on "Face the Nation," he found himself up against Mary Cheney's sister, Liz. He says the Bush team exploited a classic "Kerryism" in which the candidate "sounded insincere."

"You'd expect slightly more grown-up behavior from the media, but we went to the lowest common denominator," Lockhart says. "It was fun to talk about. The stories are not hard, and you can easily get both sides yelling and screaming about it. If it's a choice between nation-building and John Kerry somehow trying to make lesbianism an issue in the campaign, which is more fun?"

A classic case unfolded in 2000 during the first debate between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The vice president misspoke when he said he had accompanied Jamie Lee Witt, then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to tour fire damage in Houston. Gore had been on the trip, but with other FEMA officials -- a slip-up that Bush operatives e-mailed to reporters as the debate continued.

"We thought we had done pretty well," says Chris Lehane, who was Gore's spokesman. "We walked into the spin room, and I was just completely besieged. I took an absolute beating from the hundreds of reporters who were there. It became very clear that the press narrative was going to be abundantly different from what we thought we had just seen."

The problem, Lehane says, is "the things that stick play into a preexisting story line. The Gore story line was that he exaggerates." The next day, Bush hit Gore for a "pattern of exaggerations," and a flood of follow-up reports focused on whether he kept embellishing the facts.

The other plotline, which went unmentioned in the initial news accounts, was Gore's reaction while Bush was speaking. A couple of conservative pundits pointed it out, and ABC's Cokie Roberts noted that "the women in our focus group hated all that sighing and eye-rolling. Their husbands do it."

Those images became the dominant motif of the debate, to the point that before the second encounter with Bush, aides made Gore watch a tape of a "Saturday Night Live" skit in which Darrell Hammond portrayed an utterly exasperated vice president.

When Obama and McCain face off, what they say may share equal billing with how they say it and what facial expressions are picked up by the cameras.

"Fundamentally, you can't do a piece saying it was a balanced, fair and meaty debate where both candidates revealed their deep-seated political philosophy," Shapiro says. "It's hard to do a piece on the candidates' changing views of the Pakistani nuclear problem. In a YouTube era, the gaffes are going to be played all over the place. Technology is pushing us toward faster analysis, faster formation of the conventional wisdom."