A Television Event That Delivered High Drama and Garnered High Ratings
By JAMES BENNET and JIM RUTENBERG
PHOENIX, Oct. 14 - Despite competition from two baseball playoff games, the third and final presidential debate, held Wednesday night in Tempe, drew more than 51 million viewers - more than watched any of the presidential debates in 2000 or 1996.
Through the three debates, over four and a half hours of exchanges, President Bush and Senator John Kerry had the chance that candidates say they long for: to reach an attentive public directly on matters of substance, on well-being and war.
The 30-second advertisements and prepared texts dropped away as each man, haltingly at times, supplied specific detail on plans for health care and taxes, and a vision of sorts for America's conduct in the world.
Each made promises that may ultimately be tested - Mr. Kerry that he would never raise taxes on families making less than $200,000 a year, and Mr. Bush that he would never impose a draft.
Unlike some memorable face-offs in the past, these debates had no single crystallizing moment. The canned lines fell flat. Rather, it was the two men's conduct as it revealed itself answer by answer, fidget by fidget, that made these debates a pivot point in the campaign, honing a new edge for Mr. Kerry's challenge.
The two men entered the debates with all attention centered on Mr. Kerry, on whether he had the character to be president. But over the course of the debates, the focus shifted to traditional ground: the record of the incumbent and the question of whether he had earned a second term.
In the end, Mr. Kerry proved steady and sonorous. He committed few lasting gaffes, apart from recruiting Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter, a lesbian, for an answer Wednesday to a question about homosexuality.
Mr. Bush's far more erratic performance supplied the more memorable lines and gestures, from his frequent scowls and wearied allusions to "hard work" in the first debate to discussion of the "Internets" in the second to his fixed smiles and remarks on faith in the third.
Viewership actually rose between the second debate, held on a Friday, and the third. "This is by far the most successful new television show of the fall season," said Robert Thompson, professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University. "If nothing else, it really kind of yanked the American populace, the citizens of the country, to attention on this stuff: even if you weren't watching the debates, you were hearing about them, and the high drama gave these things a buzz they haven't had since at least '92."
Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, said of the candidates, "You could have watched these debates and not known much about them and known a lot by the end - what their views are on the size of government, how they want to use force, and also how they would relate to the American people if they had to go on television and ask the American people for sacrifice."
Voters also gained new insights when the candidates struggled and failed to differentiate themselves. Augustus Richard Norton, a professor of international relations and anthropology at Boston University, said: "On Iraq, it seems to me there was a very sad consensus between the two candidates that we're stuck in Iraq. It was painfully obvious that neither man had any clear answers about how he might succeed."
But, he said, "Certainly in terms of the war against terrorism, voters were offered a very different perspective on how the U.S. needs to proceed in a dangerous world."
Mr. Kerry repeatedly emphasized that he would be better at working with allies; while never conceding that argument, Mr. Bush said that he had the strength of character to go it alone in the American interest.
Voters who tuned in to the debates saw a very different matchup than the one they had been hearing about - if they were paying attention - for two months.
By late September, on the eve of the first debate, Mr. Kerry's candidacy was beset by stories of campaign-staff shakeups that contrasted with accounts of a self-assured, glitch-free Bush-Cheney juggernaut that had labeled him a flip-flopper.
Yet it was Senator Kerry who proved almost robotically consistent, affecting the same earnest, respectful demeanor even as, through each debate, he lacerated Mr. Bush as incompetent in fighting war and helping the middle class.
It was Mr. Bush who was changeable, shifting the thrust of his attacks - from saying that Mr. Kerry was inconstant to saying he was constantly liberal - and even, it seemed, adjusting his personality for political purposes, of all things.
Peter Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University, said research on debates suggested that in most cases, "people's priors are reinforced. They have a bit more information." Supporters of each candidate search for, and find, more reason to support him, he said.
Entering the debates, Professor Feaver said, Mr. Kerry had the task of "shoring up his anxious base - they weren't writing his obit, but they sensed that the commentariat was writing his obituary leading into the first debate."
On Sept. 30, the day of the first debate, held in Coral Gables, Fla., Claire Shipman said on ABC's "Good Morning America," "Conventional wisdom holds that Kerry has to put in a terrific performance tonight."
After the third debate, John Dickerson of Time magazine was telling CNN, "The president does not have the momentum right now."
Some analysts saw the debates as little short of revolutionary. "The debates have certainly been transformative and perhaps definitive," said David Gergen, professor of public service at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. "The pressure is now on Bush to regain the momentum."
But Nelson W. Polsby, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, cautioned that the race has been about Mr. Bush all along - that the underlying source of Mr. Kerry's support has been dissatisfaction with Mr. Bush.
Mr. Kerry, he said, needed to prove he was "a safe pair of hands" and could serve as an "acceptable residual category - as George McGovern, for example, was not." The debates may have helped him do that, he said, but in general both candidates managed little more than to sharpen their messages. "It took them some time to arrive at that, oddly," he said.
The debates have had a clear, if subtle, effect on the images of the candidates - judging, at least, from "Saturday Night Live."
After the first debate in 2000, the show portrayed Mr. Bush as a poorly spoken bumbler; after the second, as a cocksure fraternity graduate proud of his newfound ability to pronounce foreign leaders' names. That stereotype held through the Sept. 11 attacks, two wars and much of the presidential campaign - until the first debate this year.
James Downey, a "Saturday Night Live" senior writer who worked on his first presidential debate sketch for the show in 1988, said his comedic interpretation of Mr. Bush changed immediately after that debate.
Then, and in the sketches that have followed, Mr. Bush, played by Will Forte, was petulant and jumpy. "The general tone of that first debate to me was Bush sort of pleading and being a little bit whiny," Mr. Downey said. "Normally he's more upbeat and confident."
Mr. Kerry's caricature evolved slightly between the "Saturday Night Live" episode that followed the first debate and the one that followed the second. In the first sketch he was portrayed as a serial panderer, in the second as the clear winner of the debates despite his own personality failings.
At the end of one exchange in the sketch that ran on Saturday, the actor playing Mr. Kerry, Seth Meyers, said: "I should just sit down, confident in the fact that I just cleaned the president's clock, and not say anything else. But I'm not going to do that. No, I'm gonna keep on talking. Why? Because I can't help myself."
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