ON PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

On Presidential Debates

Thoughts in and around geopolitics.

By: George Friedman

As I write this, my wife is watching the presidential debate in another room. I am sitting alone and sipping a port because I loathe presidential debates. This has nothing to do with the candidates – they are a separate matter. 

I hate presidential debates because they are designed to bring out the worst in every candidate, making it impossible to determine whether any of them is worthy of the office. Had Thomas Jefferson debated John Adams the way debates have been staged since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, I would have hated them too.

To understand what I am saying, we need to distinguish between being clever and being smart. There are several differences between the two, but for the current topic, the useful distinction is between thinking fast and thinking deep. 

Thinking fast allows you to see an opportunity, conjure a sharp statement and focus for an hour. Thinking deep means recognizing that the issues are all complex and therefore being unable to give simplistic responses to questions that are unanswerable in the time allowed. No issue to be faced by a president could responsibly be addressed in an hour. 

A candidate might have thought deeply on race, but precisely because he had thought deeply he would be aware of the difficulty and danger of trying to express what he has thought in two sentences.

Clever has the power to take your breath away with a witty and apt jab. Smart is boring. The deeper you see, the harder it is to talk about it. 

A smart person who takes on a clever person in front of an audience with limited time and interest will always lose. The first modern debate was between Kennedy and Nixon. Nixon had far more experience on the issues. Kennedy won the night by claiming that President Dwight Eisenhower had allowed a missile gap to develop. 

The statement was untrue, and Kennedy knew it was untrue, but it didn’t matter. A clever falsehood can sweep the table in a sentence. The explanation of why the statement is untrue requires a great deal of time.

The smart frequently suffer from the social defect of the inability to be glib. The paradox is that a person appears to be less than bright, when standing next to a truly clever candidate. It is not impossible to be smart and clever. 

Franklin Roosevelt was brilliant in many ways, but he was also able to say what he was thinking in a way that the audience could understand and be persuaded by. 

The fireside chats were clever. But FDR did not have to stand next to a simply clever man. He had the freedom that comes from owning the moment and using it to sum up the complexity of your knowledge. 

FDR had the opportunity to reveal his depth without simultaneously fending off a clever man. He might have won a debate, but showing that you are more clever than the other guy is hardly a qualification for president.

A competent president must think deeply on a dizzying range of issues, yet a president need not be a master improviser. Rather, a president should have thought deeply about what to do when the moment to act comes. 

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson told Kennedy that his first task as president was to go off alone and think about whether he would be prepared to use nuclear weapons and, if so, identify the circumstances under which he would. Acheson told him not to tell anyone what he had decided. A president manages a crisis by going away and thinking about it even before it happens.

The hunger for the clever leads the American people into some absurdities. Eisenhower had been a soldier and was not always clear when speaking. The media therefore raised the question of whether he was suited for the presidency. 

Here was the supreme commander of Operation Overlord, the first commander of NATO and the man who negotiated an end to the Korean War, being ridiculed at times because of his convoluted public speaking. 

Some claimed he was senile. He wasn’t, but the media expected the president to be clever, and Eisenhower was deep and complex. He likely defeated Adlai Stevenson only because both were, in their own way, smart. In those days, clever might not have been as honored as it is today. Since the debate became a critical part of a presidential campaign, we have been plagued by clever presidents.

This makes the task of a citizen far more difficult. The citizen must have the discipline not to draw rapid judgments and to listen carefully to what someone wishing to govern has to say. Looking back in history, we see few instances in which elections weren’t raucous occasions. 

What saved the day was the expectations the public placed on candidates. Candidates were expected to comport themselves appropriately. The public can rant, but smart candidates let others do the ranting for them.

Unfortunately, sometimes debates are the only opportunity for a citizen to judge the candidate. A citizen’s fundamental job is to figure out who is smart and who is merely clever – and, of course, who is neither, which shows rather quickly. This is a tricky business; voters often can’t know whether there is actually a missile gap. 

When President Harry S. Truman placed a plaque on his desk saying “the buck stops here,” the public had to decide if he was clever or smart or both in publicizing that plaque.

Democracy generally places a premium on the clever because the clever can move the public in a way that the smart usually can’t. The smart will drone on subjects such as health care or nuclear war. 

The smart know that the subjects are so important that they need to be dealt with soberly, and so complex that they need to be dissected in excruciating detail. There is no need for one liners that dazzle, but an absolute need for sobriety and meticulous thought.

So my bottle of Taylor Fladgate 20 and I are refusing to watch the debate. I brood over what is the fundamental distinction within human reason, of which the presidential debates are merely specimens. 

Democracy frightened the founders, and the debates remind me, after the third glass, that there has to be a better way. There isn’t unless we demand it, but we love the clever sally and loathe the boring truth.