Q: The debates that took place in 2004, how do you cover a debate? How do you decide what to write about when you’re writing about a debate?

BALZ: It’s always one of the hardest stories you do as a journalist. And now [01:11:00] we do, you know, between, primary elections and general elections, you know, we did 20 and 20 in the 2008 campaign, the Republican and Democratic nomination process, and then the three presidential and one vice presidential debate. They’re hard to write, because you want to give a fair rendering of the points made by the candidates. You owe that to people who didn’t watch the debate, or even people who did watch the debate, to give them a fair recitation of, kind of, point-counterpoint, and this. But you also need to try to give some sense of how it all shook out. Did somebody have a really good night or a really bad night? We know that, because of television that what lives on after a debate is not the dialogue, it’s a sound bite, or two sound bites. You have to be mindful [01:12:00] of what those sound bites are, or are likely to be, and to give them enough prominence, but not to try to overdo it. And as I say, everybody will watch a debate and come away with a slightly different view. I don’t think, and I’ve written scores of debate stories over many, many years, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten up the next morning and thought, well, that was a really great story. (laughter) I mean, I always get up and think, oh, you know, or an hour after deadline, there’s a quote I forgot to add, or there was this that didn’t get into the story, or you know, you’ll see somebody else’s story, and they’ll have made a point, and you think, oh, that was a smart point to make. There’s so much that you have to try to put in. I mean, one of the things I always tried to do in a multi-candidate debate was to give voice to every candidate. I mean, have something in the story from each of the candidates, minor as they may be, insignificant [01:13:00] as they may be in the overall scheme of things, again, because, you know, they’re going to get some votes, and they were on the stage, and you know, sometimes, they play a significant role at a moment in the debate, but there’s only so much time and space to do a story like that, and the more you try to kind of keep that balance, the more some of this other stuff gets squeezed out. So, they are hard to write. I remember in the 2000 campaign, the first debate with Bush and Gore is now mostly remembered for Al Gore sighing. Right, I mean, you know, if people say, “Well, what happened in the first debate?” It was, well, Al Gore sighed. And we were in the filing center up in Boston for that debate, and we couldn’t hear the sigh, we really couldn’t hear any of it. So, this was something that happened, in a sense, after the fact. It became the story after the fact, in part because the Bush campaign was very effective in spinning that story afterwards. [01:14:00] You want to be where the debate is, but you’re watching it on TV in a filing center that’s noisy, it’s not the most ideal conditions. So, there are a lot of reasons why those stories are difficult to write.

Q: And you mentioned, you know, what people remember about the first Bush-Gore debate. The Kerry people will say that, you know, the instant polls show they won every debate. But it seems like the only things people remember are, you know, global test, and what Edwards and Kerry said about Mary Cheney, all of which worked to Bush’s benefit.

BALZ: Right.

Q: How does that happen? I mean, how is it that the debates end up being remembered for something different from — some particular thing?

BALZ: Well, I think the first debate in ’04, I think most people [01:15:00] came away with that with the feeling that Kerry had gotten the better of Bush. Now, you know, when you’re writing the news story about that, you know, you’re not supposed to say that overwhelmingly, you know? You’re supposed to say, you know, they clashed over this and that, and Bush made this point, and Kerry made that. And, you know, Kerry had a strong night, and Bush had his moments, I mean, there are ways to kind of telegraph, but you don’t go overboard with calling balls and strikes. But we know now in politics that so much of it is the commentary in relatively real-time. And because sound bites are important, because so much of what is talked about in the debate has been talked about a lot. You know, a lot of these issues have been adjudicated over, and over, and over. I mean, if you’re doing 20 Democratic debates during the primaries, [01:16:00] you know, you can only write, as we did in ’08, Democrats clash over Iraq in debate. Adam Nagourney of The New York Times and I joked long after the campaign was over that it seemed like every lead we wrote for weeks on those debates was, you know, some variation of that. So, what people are looking for is something that was different. And something maybe slightly controversial. And that feeds the post-debate commentary, and the post-debate commentary, as we know, feeds what the public perceptions are several days after the debate. I mean, Gerald Ford’s gaffe about, you know, Poland in 1976 became significant mostly after the debate, and not just an hour after the debate, days after the debate it took for that to kind of become the narrative of what had happened in that debate. And so, now that same thing happens, but the timing is compressed, and [01:17:00] you know, we’re now in the age of Twitter, which means that it happens not right after the debate, it happens during the debate. I mean, the first debate in 2012, there were 10 million tweets in that 90-minute debate by, you know, everybody. And it was clear within the first 15 or 20 minutes, that on Twitter, Barack Obama was losing that debate, and it never changed. You know, they had spin alley set up in Denver for that debate, and there was nothing that the Obama team could do in spin alley to change what had already been the verdict. In ’04, you didn’t have Twitter, but you did have, you know, the cable chatter machine. And it takes those moments, it takes those bites, it digests them very quickly, it spews out things, and it focuses on a couple of things, and that’s the verdict.

Q: Do you think the debates [01:18:00] had any effect on the election?

BALZ: Well, I think that the first debate helped Kerry get back in the game, you know, in a significant way. And I know the Kerry people think that he was in a stressful position heading into that debate, and that debate helped create the perception, again, that this was a very competitive race, you know, which it certainly was. And so, that first debate helped in that perception, but I don’t think in the end these debates are decisive in the outcome. I don’t think ’04 was, I don’t think ’08 was, and I don’t think 2012 was.

Q: The Kerry people will say that Bush showed up to debate a caricature of Kerry that they’d created in their own minds, that he was long-winded, that he couldn’t make a clear point. Is there something about, [01:19:00] as was commented on in 2012, there was something about incumbent presidents, going into at least that first debate, that it sort of structurally makes them unprepared?

BALZ: Yes, I mean, the history of the first debates by incumbents in re-election campaigns is that they usually don’t do particularly well. And there are a lot of reasons for that. One is, they think they know the issues. You know, I’m dealing with these issues, you know, I’ve been dealing with these issues for four years, you know, you don’t have to tell me what to think, or what to say, I know these issues. So they’re overconfident about how much preparation they need to do. Second, they’re rusty. I mean, they haven’t debated in four years. The challenger, particularly in these recent campaigns, has gone through a lot of debates, and they have become more skillful debaters. And there’s nothing that says skill as a debater in a presidential campaign [01:20:00] bears any resemblance to what it takes to be president, but nonetheless, it’s a rite of passage; you have to get through it. And if you are rusty, you’re not going to do as well. There’s a story told to me that in 2012, shortly before the first debate, President Bush, George W. Bush, had a conversation with Mitt Romney, and said, “You are going to do fine tomorrow night. I know from my own experience that President Obama is not going to be as prepared as he ought to be for this first debate,” because Bush recognized after the fact that he wasn’t as prepared as he needed to be. So, there is something about these first debates. There’s one other point, which is, if you’re the president, you are surrounded by people who — they may disagree with you on some things, but they’re very respectful. Mr. President, you know, if I may, you know, may I–when you’re on the debate stage against your opponent in a general election, they are not going to be polite. [01:21:00] They are not going to say, Mr. President, may I politely disagree with you, I mean, they’re just going to go right at you. And, you know, John Kerry is a pretty good debater. And whatever caricature that the Bush people thought about him, as the person that they kind of conjured up that they wanted to run against, wasn’t the same person that they ran into on the stage. You know, he knew his brief, he was crisp in delivering it, he probably, as we’ve said, didn’t have a lot of respect for his opponent, and so, he wasn’t cowed by the notion that President Bush knows all of this, and I’m a mere challenger; he probably thought he knew the issues better than Bush and was prepared to go, you know, hammer and tong in that debate against him.