How the Pitfalls of Past Debates Inform 2020 Candidates’ Playbooks

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/13/video/2020-presidential-debate-moments.html

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The 12 Democratic candidates taking the debate stage on Tuesday night will all try to achieve a standout moment.

All will hope to avoid a catastrophe.

Televised debates have yielded several turning points for presidential contenders. We asked Times political reporters past and present to analyze a few of these pivotal debate interactions and explain how the lessons resonate in the playbooks of today’s candidates.

Debates often demand balancing acts from participants — to exude strength without being meanspirited, to deliver well-worn platform points with a perceptible authenticity and to be “likable” enough while defending their policies.

But on a crowded stage, the pressure to break through or get a leg up intensifies, and the risk-reward ratio skews. “Your best moment might ricochet in the media and throughout the campaign for days or weeks. But your worst moment is actually much more likely to,” said the Times national political correspondent Alex Burns.

In 1976, Max Frankel, a Times editor, became indelibly linked to a gaffe that many say helped change the course of a presidential race. While moderating a live televised debate between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, Mr. Frankel posed a question to the incumbent President Ford regarding United States-Soviet relations and the sphere of influence in Europe. In his response, President Ford said, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” Realizing the significance of the statement, a perceptibly incredulous Mr. Frankel recovered quickly with a follow-up question to offer Ford the opportunity to clarify what he had meant.

Mr. Frankel, now 89, has only viewed the exchange a handful of times, usually at the urging of his grandchildren who watch it on YouTube. He credited his editor, James “Scotty” Reston, with the training that “you don’t trick a president into comments.”

“A presidential comment has worldwide implications,” he said. “And if something is unclear or if you misunderstand it or he’s misspoken, you go back at him and you say, ‘Excuse me, did you mean to say, or did I understand you correctly to say …’ That’s the way to handle a presidential inquiry.”

But President Ford didn’t clarify his statement. Said Mr. Frankel with a laugh: “He only dug in deeper.”

The rest is history.