Inside The Debate Strategies

Weld learned otherwise—the hard way. The well-liked Massachusetts Governor knew he was in trouble from the first of his eight debates with Kerry, when he pointed to the mother of a slain police officer in the audience and challenged the Senator to explain his opposition to the death penalty. Kerry began by calling cop killers "scum," then said, "I know something about killing," understanding that nearly every voter watching would make the connection that Weld, who had a bad back, had got out of going to Vietnam. "He then went on about his experiences in Vietnam," Weld recalls. "Everybody forgot what the question had been."

But if Kerry is at his rhetorical best when he's feeling the heat, it's not the only thing the Bush camp has noticed about him. Even as Kerry was turning the tables on Weld over the death penalty, he kept wiping a dribble of perspiration that was creeping from his right temple to his eye. "He's a sweater," chortles a G.O.P. official, "and women don't like sweaters." That's why Bush's team was happy to have the Kerry campaign climb down from its demand that the debate hall be chilled to below 70 degrees. The Jordan-Baker agreement stipulates that the debate commission use "best efforts to maintain an appropriate temperature according to industry standards." Whatever those are.

If Kerry's strongest debating weapon is agility, Bush's is the discipline to stick to his talking points. "No matter what the question, he delivers the message he wants delivered, and he's very, very good at it," recalls Ann Richards, whom Bush unseated in 1994 to become Texas Governor. In their debate, while Richards tried to make the case that Bush had been a serial failure in business—suggesting he would be out of his depth as Governor—he coolly accused her of trying to distract voters from the issues facing Texas, reciting over and over his mantra of welfare reform, juvenile justice and education. "He kicked her butt across Texas," says a senior Kerry adviser.

It was a style that would also put Gore at a disadvantage six years later, and Kerry's challenge, Richards predicts, will be to do what neither she nor Gore could: "Insist on some explanations and some details and not allow him to gloss over issues." But Cahill concedes that Kerry's chances—and those of the debate moderators—will be limited by the Bush campaign's insistence that follow-up questions and rebuttals be sharply restricted.

The biggest mistake any candidate can make is to think of these as debates at all. Reality TV is more like it. "People watch these things more like they are watching Friends than the way they watch the Harvard and Yale debate societies," says Chris Lehane, who was Gore's press secretary. "They're not watching to see who scores the points. They're watching to see who they connect with and feel comfortable with."

Every now and then, magic can happen. It wasn't until Ronald Reagan demolished Jimmy Carter's repeated critique of his position on Medicare with "There you go again" that many Americans began to get comfortable with the idea of Reagan in the Oval Office. But more often, what voters take away from the debates is confirmation of their misgivings about a candidate: Richard Nixon's inner darkness, Gerald Ford's cluelessness, George H.W. Bush's aloofness, Gore's changeability.

And the debate isn't over when the candidates have finished their closing statements. Just as important to their campaigns will be winning the post-debate effort to spin what actually happened. It wasn't until a day or two after the first debate in 2000 that the analysis turned to Gore's exaggerated claims and his patronizing sighs. But it so neatly fit with the existing narrative about Gore that it became more important than anything else that happened that night—particularly among the vast majority of Americans who had not watched the debate with their own eyes. A study by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center found nonviewers' opinions of Gore eroding as the coverage of his manner grew more negative. So for all the energy the campaigns put into preparing for every eventuality before the debates, the greatest debate may be the one that comes after they're over.