US and the World

The Presidential Debates

When George Meets John

I don't know how I overlooked this item earlier when it first appeared. It's a fascinating analysis -- and a lengthy one -- of the debate styles of Bush and Kerry. The author, James Fallows, traces the development of their styles through videos of prior debates, including Bush versus Ann Richards and Kerry versus Weld.

He opens:

Recently I saw an amazing piece of political video. It was ten-year-old footage of George W. Bush, and it changed my mind about an important aspect of the upcoming campaign. Because the President so rarely exposes himself to live, unscripted questioning, and because he has expressed himself so poorly the few times he has risked such exposure this year, the political establishment assumes that John Kerry has a big advantage in this fall's debates.

I'm not so sure. Bush has been far more skillful in his debating career than is generally appreciated, and his successes in that realm put his widely noted lack of eloquence in a different light. During his career George Bush's speaking style has changed significantly, which is why the tape from 1994 was so intriguing. But his underlying approach to political communication has been constant—and extremely effective.

. . .

This spring I watched dozens of hours' worth of old videos of John Kerry and George W. Bush in action. But it was the hour in which Bush faced Ann Richards that I had to watch several times. The Bush on this tape was almost unrecognizable—and not just because he looked different from the figure we are accustomed to in the White House. He was younger, thinner, with much darker hair and a more eager yet less swaggering carriage than he has now. But the real difference was the way he sounded.

This Bush was eloquent. He spoke quickly and easily. He rattled off complicated sentences and brought them to the right grammatical conclusions. He mishandled a word or two ("million" when he clearly meant "billion"; "stole" when he meant "sold"), but fewer than most people would in an hour's debate. More striking, he did not pause before forcing out big words, as he so often does now, or invent mangled new ones. "To lay out my juvenile-justice plan in a minute and a half is a hard task, but I will try to do so," he said fluidly and with a smile midway through the debate, before beginning to list his principles.

. . .

I bored my friends by forcing them to watch the tape—but I could tell that I had not bored George Lakoff, a linguist from the University of California at Berkeley, who has written often of the importance of metaphor and emotional message in political communications. When I invited him to watch the Bush-Richards tape, Lakoff confirmed that everything about Bush's surface style was different. His choice of words, the pace of his speech, the length and completeness of his sentences, all made him sound like another person. Even his body language was surprising. When he was younger, Bush leaned toward the camera and did not fidget or shift his weight. He arched his eyebrows and positioned his mouth in a way that, according to Lakoff, signifies in all languages an intense, engaged form of speech.
Lakoff also emphasized that what had changed in Bush's style was less important than what had remained the same. Bush's ways of appealing to his electoral base, of demonstrating resolve and strength, of deflecting rather than rebutting criticism, had all worked against Ann Richards. These have been constants in his rhetorical presentation of himself over the years, despite the striking decline in his sentence-by-sentence speaking skills, and they have been consistently and devastatingly effective. The upcoming debates between Bush and Kerry will in an odd way be a contest of unbeaten champions.

. . .

. The contests between Bush and Kerry this year will be a political version of what the Pentagon calls "asymmetric warfare," or combat between opponents with dissimilar strengths and vulnerabilities.

. . .

In every other modern case wins and losses in presidential debates have turned on revelations of a candidate's personality, character, and temperament.

. . .

George W. Bush has thrived in this kind of competition for a deceptively simple reason: he is always on message.

. . .

About Bush's evolution as a speaker there are only a few more things to say. One is that the three years starting with the Bush-Richards debate were a kind of Golden Age of Bush. He was popular in Texas, among Democrats and Republicans alike. The Dick Cheney of that era—the experienced figure widely assumed to be showing the new leader the ropes—was his lieutenant governor, Bob Bullock, a Democrat and the epitome of the split-the-difference, uniter-not-divider school of government. Political Austin is a surprisingly small town; people from both parties run into one another in the grocery store or on the sidewalk, and Bush's retail-level personal charm served him well. "When he became governor, he was finally pleased with himself, in a good way," Paul Burka, who covered Bush through his Texas years, told me. "He felt like somebody who had finally grown up. He emanated power—not so much political power as a personal sense of confidence and ability." Yolette Garcia, who as the executive producer at KERA-TV, in Dallas, had supervised negotiations for the Bush-Richards debate, says that in those days Bush was noted for his poise and ease in public appearances—including the informal Q&As he has tried to avoid as President. "You never saw him in an awkward situation as governor," she told me. "You expected he'd know the right thing to say."
Obviously, Bush doesn't sound this way as President, and there is no one conclusive explanation for the change.

Peruse the whole piece when you have a block of time to devote to it.

He closes:

Most Democrats I spoke with said that Kerry should practice against John Edwards. William Weld told me that the Bush team should choose as a surrogate Kerry "somebody who's awfully fast on their feet—Phil Gramm, Newt Gingrich." George Bush will try in his every answer to convey "I am a wartime President, and I am strong." John Kerry will try to convey "You don't know what you are doing, and you are weak."

But other things are not known: Whether one of the men, under pressure, will reveal something about his character he did not intend to reveal. Whether John Kerry will try to challenge Bush directly on the one issue shown to disconcert him: the contrast in their war records. And whether there is anything the challenger can do to offset the incumbent's advantage.