Leaders' debate no Kennedy versus Nixon but it offers the same sad lessons

It is a commonly held belief that Democratic leader John F. Kennedy destroyed Republican Richard Nixon in the 1960 U.S. presidential debates.

In the TV version, Nixon looked swarthy, shifty eyed and disingenuous. To the regret of his handlers, the sitting vice-president of the GOP eschewed the pancake makeup that might have lightened up his dark, sinister appearance, and he melted under the extreme heat of the TV lights.

Like a memorable scene in 1987’s Broadcast News, Nixon’s top lip was lathered in sweat, which is a no-no if you want voters to hand over the reins of power in the most influential nation on the planet.

Until then, people believed winning or losing a presidential debate paled in comparison to actually sitting in the crucible of the Oval Office and making life-and-death decisions that would impact the fate of the world.

That was before Kennedy did the dirty on Nixon.   

Yes, Kennedy stood square-jawed behind the lectern as upward of 70 million Americans (an unheard-of number back then) watched him look resolute and cool under fire. He smiled his killer smile and spoke eloquently, and you could almost picture millions of voters swooning and switching their votes as they fell under the spell of his telegenic image. The boyish Kennedy had the good instincts to look straight into the camera and talk directly to the American electorate.

It’s hard to impress upon today’s post-literate electorate, now caught up in our Instagram age, how in 1960 the western world was just emerging from the uptight, repressive, black-and-white Eisenhower era. JFK’s youthful vitality and clear-eyed delivery was a 180 from the buttoned-up image of the sitting president, Ike, who looked and talked like your favourite Uncle Bob. 

Comparing JFK’s sunshiny smile to Nixon’s five o’clock shadow was no contest, and it offered up for the first-time a chance to see how the visceral (superficial?) power of imaging could impact voters.

While Kennedy’s debate “performance” on TV changed the way many voted, there was an opposite reaction among those listening on the radio. 

The critics were almost universal in their agreement that Nixon won — and won handily. 

It’s been almost 60 years since Nixon versus Kennedy, but the takeaways continue to reverberate, even more so today in a multitudinous, media-saturated universe. 

Style over substance created a paradigm shift in politics, and the benchmark moment from 1960 remains with us today. 

Viewers, pundits, even the party leaders themselves are measured by their “performance standards,” their "electability” and whether they can summon up enough “gotcha moments.”

Ronald Reagan’s 1980 debate win over Jimmy Carter is the subject of political lore. The former B-rate Hollywood actor was a master of stagecraft. He dismissed Carter’s critique of his views on Medicare with a mocking “There you go again!” And in his final summation, he delivered a KO by asking voters: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

In the 1984 federal election debate, Prime Minister John Turner positioned himself to attack his opponent, Conservative leader Brian Mulroney, about his alleged plan to set up a patronage machine in Quebec if elected. Mulroney turned the tables, however, and hit Turner upside the head by questioning his own recent spate of patronage handouts. “You had an option, sir,” he said.

The late NDP leader Jack Layton is still remembered for his putdown of the brainy but oddly detached Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in the 2011 election debate. He called him out for his abysmal attendance record in Parliament. “If you want to be prime minister, you’d better learn to be a member of Parliament first,” cracked the fiery NDPer.

Soon Stephen Harper was PM, Layton was voted in as leader of the Official Opposition, and Iggy slunk back to his old academic haunts at Harvard. 

Last Monday’s English-language debate in Gatineau, Quebec, didn’t hold the same currency. There were no memorable moments. Perhaps we were expecting too much? Or looking the wrong way?

After all, decision-making isn’t a well-understood science and can be as complex as humanity itself. The famed American anthropologist Dr. Ray Birdwhistle (1918-1994) once conducted a study at the University of Pennsylvania to determine how humans communicated with each other. He and his researchers concluded that only 7 percent of what is communicated has anything to do with the actual content of the words. The remaining 93 percent revolves around everything else we are doing while we are talking: the tempo, pitch, volume and timbre of our voices, as well as our body language.

Indeed, if you want to sell your house and are interviewing real-estate agents for the job, you might be sizing them up by everything they are doing but not saying. You are observing by stealth. It’s the same with someone trying to sell you a car or take out your daughter or offer you a timeshare in Florida. 

Does a politician want to close the deal with a voter? It’s not so important what he or she says but how they say it. 

Going into your TV room to watch a debate means your body-language receptors have been extended to the max. 

If you don’t like the way a politico conducts themselves, that might be the greatest determinant of who you think in their heart they really are. 

For this, we can thank Professor Birdwhistle. 

Yes, when it comes to a politician making a promise, read their shoulder shrugs, not their lips.

Do we even know if we are voting from the heart or the gut? It’s all very ephemeral.

Which brings us back to last Monday’s debate. 

Yes, the six major party leaders were squared off to win us over, with the two heavyweights, Liberal and Conservative party leaders Justin Trudeau and Andrew Scheer being the ones with the most to win or lose. 

And if today’s politics is all about verbal duels and accentuating the negative, which it is, then this was a tour de force.  

Trudeau and Scheer were placed side-by-side on centre stage, like gunslingers at a bar. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was off to the side, and this helped him stay out of the fray. It was easier to keep a positive approach and his verbal powder dry because of his placement. Green Party Leader Elizabeth May tried to show that her party is driven by more than one issue, while the Quebec-born entries at the event, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet and People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier, played petty but disruptive parts.

Even having the latter on stage left a bitter taste in the mouths of many watching at home. Singh cleverly seized on this to ask why the PPC leader was even there. 

Score one for the NDP leader in political optics.

The slagging of opponents went on for two hours and included some raucous highlights (or lowlights):

• Scheer’s glowering stare-downs of Trudeau. He often looked at him as a dog would a fire hydrant. To be fair, Trudeau could hardly hide his contempt, too. 

• Bernier mocking Scheer as a half-hearted conservative.

• Scheer saying Trudeau needs to be unmasked as a phony who is not to be trusted because of a series of missteps including the blackface photos and the SNC-Lavalin affair that claimed two of his top female cabinet ministers. “He's very good at pretending things,” he said. “He can't even remember how many times he put blackface on because the fact of the matter is he's always wearing a mask. He puts on a reconciliation mask and then fires the attorney general, the first one of Indigenous background. He puts on a feminist mask and then fires two strong female employees for not going along with his corruption.”

• Trudeau said Scheer is not to be trusted to consult Indigenous people when weighing whether to approve a major natural-resources project like the Trans Mountain expansion. He added that Scheer’s party is nothing but a funnel for the money-grubbers, the corporate welfare cheats, the 1 percenters. 

• Scheer said he didn’t need a lesson on how to handle Indigenous issues since it was the PM who kicked Jody Wilson-Raybould, the first justice minister of First Nations ancestry, out of the Liberal caucus over the SNC-Lavalin matter.

• Trudeau intimated that Scheer secretly harboured many of Bernier’s anti-immigrant sentiments. His role on the stage “seems to say publicly what Mr. Scheer thinks privately,” he said.

• When the questioning turned to Bill 21, Quebec’s secularism law that would ban all religious symbols from the workplace, the issue screamed for a passionate condemnation from Singh, wearing an orange turban. Instead he gave a rather nuanced response and said he’d wait to see what happened to the bill in the courts.

The optics on that one were not so good. 

While Trudeau, May and Scheer all lauded Singh’s battle to overcome injustice as a visible minority (Can you say pandering?), the PM rose to his toes to make sure everyone knew his party was the only one with a stated position against the law. 

The party leaders tried to stay clear of social issues, but Scheer’s pro-life stance on abortion and a woman’s right to choose came out, and got this memorable response from the only woman party leader on stage. 

“We will never allow a single inch of retreat from the hard-earned rights of women in this country – not one inch,” said May.

Touché!

On and on and on it went, plenty of thrust and parry, plenty of optics and little of substance for voters to munch on. 

The best line of the night went to Singh who, when commenting on the two major party leaders’ plans to solve the rising carbon in our atmosphere, called them: “Mr. Delay and Mr. Deny.”

Afterward, the pundits moved in to tell us who got in the best “zingers” or “won.” It was clearly not the Canadian electorate. 

The format was terribly flawed. Moderators were like traffic cops who had lost all use of their arms and hands. They couldn’t keep the participants from talking over each other. In modern-day political parlance, it was a “hot mess.”

Have we now entered a new debate about whether political debates are worthwhile at all? Do voters know — or care — enough about the issues to try to distill something from what is being said on stage? Is this really a personality contest and a chance to get in some digs about your opponents? Is this an exercise in futility? Are voters clearer on the issues or the candidates after Monday night? Is a leadership debate really a debate at all?

What might be more productive is a reassessment of the voting system itself and whether our first-past-the-post system is even democratic or in serious need of reformation. What kind of system allows parties to score a majority of seats in a legislature but only win a minority of votes (40+ percent)? That’s exactly what happened in the last provincial election in Ontario. It might also be the result of our next federal vote.  

Ironically, election reform was promised by Justin Trudeau in 2015 after his majority win, but like many of his promises, it fizzled out. It never even came up for discussion on Monday. A meaningful debate about installing a new form of democracy, like they have in New Zealand, should be discussed. 

The only debate should be about whether we should bother holding leadership debates anymore. Unlike past ones (Nixon-Kennedy, Reagan-Carter, Mulroney-Turner, Layton-Ignatieff) that turned the electoral tide and juiced up the electorate, ours are now lame, nasty, outdated and ineffectual. 

The truth is, picking your new leader or MP might be as simple as picking your next real-estate agent. Don’t listen to what they say but check out how they say it!