Saturday, September 29, 2012
Friday, September 28, 2012
Obama, Romney Camps Fight for Omaha Area's Electoral Vote
Obama, Romney Camps Fight for Omaha Area's Electoral Vote
kptm.com | Aug 29th 2012 11:04 PMNicole Ebat
OMAHA(KPTM)--Most states pick the president on a winner-take-all basis, but Nebraska does things a bit differently.
Nebraska is one of two states in the country that split its electoral votes.
In 2008, that meant Nebraska voted for both John McCain and Barack Obama. The one area that split the state's five electoral votes was the Second Congressional District, made up of the Omaha metro.
"As a Democrat in Nebraska the second congressional district obviously had an advantage over the rest of the state and if we can use that advantage to help the president and get one more electoral vote that could be the difference between 269 and 270 votes," said Chris Carithers with the Douglas County Democrats.
A recent poll from the We Ask America polling company has Mitt Romney leading Omaha with 47% of the vote. The president is trailing behind at 43% and 9% of the 1200 people polled said they were undecided. There was a margin of error on the poll of +/- 3.
"The republican party is confident of our ability to earn that electoral vote in the second district," said Bruce Dickes on the phone from the Republican National Convention. "We think it belongs to us and we want to make sure it stays with the Republican party."
The Democrats response to that statement: "No one owns it. It's the people's vote and what we're trying to do is let the people get back to the one person, one vote," said Carithers.
Both Omaha's Romney and Obama offices say they'll be hitting the airwaves and pounding some pavement in hopes their message is the one people vote for.
The tight Omaha numbers only have volunteers on either side revved up and ready for a fight.
About a dozen volunteers for the Lee Terry campaign spent a portion of their evening on the phone banks Wednesday night.
Many were gathered to watch Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan's speech from the Republican's convention.
"We use that get out the vote strategy, you know if we call people, remind them that this is a big election and that people in their community are supporting Republicans we think that it'll have a big impact on how they vote in November," said Bob Leddy, one of Terry's volunteers.
Some of Obama's volunteers said they saw themselves more as voting "facilitators" in that they make sure people who are already likely to vote for the president know how.
"If we're doing our job then we're going to be able to get this vote," said Matt Tilden.
"It's up to us to defend the dot. It's ours to keep and I'm going to do everything in my power to do that," said Martha Wight.
It's one thing both sides can agree on: Omaha is up for grabs this election and our one electoral vote could decide the next president.
Original Page: http://www.kptm.com/story/19413389/obama-romney-camps-fight-for-omaha-areas-electoral-vote?clienttype=generic&mobilecgbypass
Shared from Read It Later
Electoral College tie becomes a growing possibility
Electoral College tie becomes a growing possibility
by Scott Bomboy, blog.constitutioncenter.orgNovember 30th -0001
The chances of a tied presidential election in the Electoral College seem as remote as the odds of the Titanic hitting an iceberg. But there are at least six scenarios that could drive the Obama-Romney contest into overtime.
In 2012, there are now three plausible scenarios that would each give Barack Obama and Mitt Romney 269 electoral votes in the November election. A candidate needs 270 votes to become president.
And there are two even more bizarre twists. If the Democrats retain control of the Senate in the general election and the presidential candidates are tied, Mitt Romney would likely become president and Joe Biden would be his vice president.
But if Barack Obama gets the most votes in Nebraska’s second congressional district, which covers Omaha, he will get one electoral vote–which he did in 2008. The heavily Republican state is one of just two states (the other is Maine) that award electoral votes by congressional district, so winning Omaha means winning one of the state’s five electoral votes.
Thanks to the 12th Amendment, a tie in the presidential race is sent to Congress once the electors from each state cast their votes in December. If a candidate doesn’t have a majority of the electoral votes, the House picks the president and the Senate picks the vice president.
So in 2012, a tie is as good as a win for Mitt Romney, since the GOP controls the House. The Democrats currently control the Senate, and if they retain control after November, Biden would win a subsequent vice presidential vote in the runoff election.
The 12th Amendment sought to clean up the convoluted election of 1800, when Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied in the Electoral College, and tie-breaking vote by Congress resulted in an awkward pairing of rivals John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The amendment was ratified in 1804, and its rules decided the 1824 election, when the House picked John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson when neither candidate had a majority.
But the passage of the 23rd Amendment changed the electoral math. When that amendment awarded three electoral votes to the District of Columbia in 1961, the total number of electoral votes became 538–an even number that can be split exactly in half.
The three plausible tie scenarios
As we move through September, most political experts agree that nine states are toss-up elections that are too close to call. Two other states—Michigan and Pennsylvania—could come into play.
So quite simply, there are various combinations of those nine states’ votes that come out to a 269-269 vote tie between Obama and Romney.
Politico has an app that lets you test your own combinations, in a kind of Electoral College Sudoku, to find the ties yourself.
But here are the mostly likely deadlock combinations.
Scenario 1: Romney takes Florida and Ohio, and four other swing states
If the GOP contender can take Florida and Ohio, the two biggest swing-state prizes, then all bets are off. Add North Carolina and Wisconsin, and then either Iowa or Nevada, and Romney has exactly 269 electoral votes.
North Carolina and Wisconsin (Paul Ryan’s home state) are definitely possibilities for Romney. In current polling, Romney leads in North Carolina and Obama has small leads in Wisconsin and Iowa.
Image source: http://electoralmap.net
Scenario 2A and 2B: Romney takes Florida and Ohio, and five other swing states
This scenario also requires that Romney take Florida and Ohio, and then he has two possible combinations: Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, and Wisconsin; or North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Iowa.
Both combinations give Romney 269 electoral votes. New Hampshire and Colorado seem like longer shots for Romney, but he remains in striking distances in those two states, according to recent polls.
Scenario 3: Romney loses Ohio but gains Michigan
Stranger things have happened in elections, but substituting Michigan for Ohio could be a big win for Romney. Then, the GOP needs to take Florida, Virginia, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Iowa or Nevada. The result: 269 electoral votes!
Scenario 4: Romney loses Ohio but gains Pennsylvania
It would be a long shot, but Pennsylvania is on the edge of being a swing state. Add Florida, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Nevada, or Iowa, and the results come to 269 electoral votes.
A lot of things need to go right for Romney to win Pennsylvania, including a low voter turnout in the Keystone state and a swell of grassroots support west of Philadelphia. This is definitely a longer shot than the three scenarios we mentioned above.
Scenario 5: Hey, don’t forget about Omaha!
So what if President Obama takes just Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina? Then the total results become 270-268 for Romney. But then President Obama wins the one vote in Omaha, and it moves back to a tied election.
Want another combination? How about Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, and Wisconsin for Romney? That also gives Romney a total of 270 electoral votes, before that Omaha adjustment and the race becomes a tie.
Or try out this scenario: Obama takes Florida and Ohio, and loses every other swing state and Michigan. The result: Romney has 270 electoral votes, and an Omaha vote for Obama ties the election again!
The bottom line: Omaha is the deciding factor in our first three scenarios, which show a tied election if Romney can win Florida and Ohio, and the right combination of four or five of the remaining swing states.
Obama then breaks the tie if he takes that one electoral vote from Omaha, with its population of 570,000 people (which is about half the size of Palm Beach County in Florida).
Of course, Nebraska and Maine are the only two states that divide their electoral votes by congressional district, and that has only happened once since both states changed their laws.
That was in 2008, when candidate Barack Obama took Omaha from John McCain.
A local TV station in Omaha says local polling shows Romney with a 4 percent lead over Obama in the city, as both sides spend heavily.
A Democratic official told Fox 42 News both sides were aware of the significance of that one electoral vote.
“As a Democrat in Nebraska the second congressional district obviously had an advantage over the rest of the state and if we can use that advantage to help the president and get one more electoral vote that could be the difference between 269 and 270 votes,” said Chris Carithers with the Douglas County Democrats.
Table: The Top Three Scenarios
Scott Bomboy is the Editor-in-Chief of the National Constitution Center.
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Original Page: http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2012/09/electoral-college-tie-becomes-a-growing-possibility/
Shared from Read It Later
Swing state polls put Obama closer to election-day win
Swing state polls put Obama closer to election-day win
by Scott Bomboy, blog.constitutioncenter.orgNovember 30th -0001
Expect a flurry of campaign activity in nine battleground states until Election Day: The latest polls show President Barack Obama closer to clinching the presidential race, unless the GOP can stem the tide in a handful of swing states.
Key states such as Ohio and Florida have been bombarded for months with TV ads and candidate appearances. Recent polls show two other states have moved back toward the Obama column, and a third is likely to follow soon.
The results put Obama at 260 projected electoral votes, with 270 needed to win. Challenger Mitt Romney has a projected 191 electoral votes.
For our consensus poll analysis, we refer to the web site Real Clear Politics, which tracks campaign polls locally and nationally.
The significance of the events weren’t lost ABC journalist George Stephanopoulos, who appeared on Piers Morgan’s CNN talk show last night.
When asked upfront by Morgan about the race, Stephanopoulos said the big development was the constant importance of the swing state campaigns.
As any student could tell you on this Constitution Week, it’s all about the Electoral College when it comes to presidential races. So while national polls may be for “show,” the Electoral College race is for “the dough.”
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Even though the difference between Obama and Romney is “too close to call” in the popular vote, the projected Electoral College race isn’t nearly as close, when it comes to consensus polls.
For example, the most recent Gallup poll puts the general election in a deadlock, with each candidate tied—ironically—at 47 percent.
Other national polls show Obama with a slight lead, with an average lead of 3.1 percent.
The Real Clear Politics consensus of polls in swing states shows a much different picture.
In percentage terms, Obama has 46 percent of the projected electoral vote total of 538 votes, compared with 35.5 percent for Romney. That is a difference of 11.5 percent in electoral votes, versus 3 percent in the current consensus poll of national votes from Real Clear Politics.
In the past two weeks, Michigan and then Wisconsin moved back into the list of states leaning to Obama, based on polling data.
That puts Obama’s total at 247 projected electoral votes. Virginia, with its 13 electoral votes, seems like the next state to move toward the Obama column, unless the GOP can stem the tide.
At 260 electoral votes, the Democrats would only need to take one or two of the remaining seven swing states to win the presidency.
To be sure, a lot can change between now and Election Day, and polls have margins of error. Also, internal polls conducted by candidates can differ greatly from public polls.
Still, the math shows that the Romney and Obama campaigns will be investing heavily in Wisconsin and Virginia.
Northern Virginia has seen record levels of TV ad spending via commercials in the Washington, D.C. market, and southern Virginia has a third-party spoiler candidate, Virgil Goode, who could take votes away from Romney.
The GOP has two high-profile faces in Wisconsin—Paul Ryan and Scott Walker—but it is losing ground in polls there.
The consensus polling data from the past week in Wisconsin shows a growing Obama lead of 7 percent in the state.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that internal campaign polls showed the Wisconsin race as being closer and within the margin of error. But the Republican senate candidate in the Badger state was blunt about his own prospects.
“You know, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, if your standard-bearer for the presidency is not doing well, it’s going to reflect on the down ballot,” said former Governor Tommy Thompson.
Among the seven remaining battleground states, Romney has the biggest current polling deficit in Ohio. But even if the GOP can rally to take Ohio, President Obama can win the national election and still lose Ohio and Florida, if he keeps Wisconsin and Virginia in his win column.
There were reports late this week that Romney would focus more on personal appearances in swing states. He received some criticism for appearing in events this past week in four non-swing states: California, Utah, Georgia and Texas.
Romney and running mate Paul Ryan have scheduled a three-day bus tour of Ohio next week among its swing state events.
Scott Bomboy is the Editor-in-Chief of the National Constitution Center.
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Original Page: http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2012/09/swing-state-polls-put-obama-closer-to-election-day-win/
Shared from Read It Later
Swing states: an exclusive TV ad analysis
Ads Slice Up Swing States With Growing Precision
by Ari Shapiro, npr.orgSeptember 24th 2012
First of a two-part series
Spend time watching TV in Colorado Springs, Colo., and you'll feel as though Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are King Kong and Godzilla, planted at the foot of the Front Range mountains for an epic fight that still has seven weeks to go. This city is home to fewer than half a million people, yet campaign spending here has tripled since 2008, landing it among the top 10 advertising markets in the country.
Colorado Springs provides a telling glimpse into the impact that political ads are having across the country in a year when the candidates and outside groups have blasted through every previous spending record.
Kyle Blakeley owns a local advertising company that bears his name. During campaign season four years ago, he went to a local TV news station and asked to buy a 30-second ad that would typically cost $300 to $500.
"They were talking to us about needing to pay $1,500 for that spot. But they had a national campaign come in at the last minute with some money and pay $7,000 for that spot," Blakeley says. That's 14 times the standard price.
"That's pretty typical," says political scientist Robin Kolodny. She studies campaign ad spending at Temple University in Philadelphia. "In 2006, when I did all the data gathering, a 30-second spot on the Philadelphia Eagles game was $65,000."
Broadcasters know there is a small window of time when they can charge a premium and campaigns will pay it. Campaigns have to get rid of their cash, because it will be useless the day after an election.
And those eye-popping examples are from past campaigns. This year everything is supersized — except for the number of swing states in play. So a bigger pot of money is getting pumped into a smaller pool of states.
A Focus On Second-Tier Ad Markets
"I've been someone who always sort of pooh-poohs 'this is the record year,' " says Ken Goldstein of Kantar Media, which tracks political ad spending. "But this really is a year when there is such focus on relatively few markets that the levels of advertising we're seeing are really uncharted waters."
Goldstein's firm did some research exclusively for NPR and PBS NewsHour. The data show that last week in Colorado Springs, political advertisers spent more than $300,000. That's three times what they spent during the same period in 2008. And the pattern is true of second-tier media markets across the country.
In Dayton, Ohio, since the beginning of the general election, ad spending has tripled compared with 2008.
In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, political advertisers have spent six times what they did in 2008.
In Richmond, Va., the increase is tenfold.
And the jump in these second-tier markets is much bigger than the national jump. Across the country, ad spending has about doubled since the last election. Even adjusting for the fact that fewer swing states are sharing a bigger pot of money, it seems that second-tier cities are getting much more attention than usual.
Colorado Springs is not an obvious place for all of this presidential action. Republicans outnumber Democrats in El Paso County more than 2 to 1. Barack Obama lost this part of Colorado to John McCain by 19 points in 2008.
"It's not a matter of just winning; it's winning by how much," says Rich Beeson, a fifth-generation Coloradan and political director for the Romney campaign.
Presidential campaigns know exactly the margin of victory or defeat that they have to hit in each town in order to carry an entire state. Democratic media strategist Tad Devine says campaigns set extremely specific goals based on hard data.
"Once those numbers, once the vote goals are developed, then the campaign sets out in a lot of different ways — at the grass-roots level, by organizing door to door, at the communications and advertising level, by broadcast media like television advertising — to achieve those goals."
Democrats Outspending Republicans
Although no one suggests that President Obama will win Colorado Springs, whether he loses it by 15 or 25 points could determine whether he carries Colorado.
Beeson of the Romney campaign says smaller cities are vital to this chess game, especially since they're cheaper to advertise in.
"A lot of secondary markets are very key to the overall map, whether it's a Charlottesville in Virginia or a Colorado Springs in Colorado," he says. "You can't ever cede the ground to anyone."
But in many swing states this year, Republicans have ceded ground to the Democrats.
Heavy Rotation
These ads, from both the Romney Campaign and the Obama Campaign, are being aired frequently in Colorado television markets.
According to Kantar Media research conducted for NPR, the Romney campaign spent about $425,000 advertising in Colorado last week. The Obama campaign spent more than twice that amount.
Take Colorado. According to new research conducted for NPR and NewsHour by Kantar Media, last week the Romney campaign spent about $425,000 advertising in the state. The Obama campaign spent more than twice that amount. Outside Republican groups helped close the gap in Colorado a bit, but even factoring in all of the outside groups' political ads, Democrats outspent Republicans in the state last week by about 25 percent.
And that pattern of Democrats outspending Republicans has been true in other swing states, during other weeks.
All of this spending means that if you work at a local TV station in a swing state right now, you are very lucky and very busy.
At the local ABC affiliate in Denver, Missy Evanson can look at the polls on a Monday and predict how much her phone will be ringing for the rest of the week.
"The thing about a television station," she says, "it's a finite supply. This is classic economics, right? Supply and demand theory: I've got so many parking spots, it's a race to see who gets 'em."
Over the third quarter — June, July and August of this year — her station's ad revenues have doubled every month. And she says it's still growing exponentially.
"September will double August, and then ... in the month of October, in one month, we will have a million more dollars than what we had in the entire quarter."
Being 'More Creative' When The Circus Comes To Town
That extra money is not exactly a stimulus package for the community. It's a buffer that the stations count on for the off years, says Evanson.
"The very next year is extremely tough for us," she says. "The way that we will negotiate annual business and quarterly business next year is going to be a complete 180 from what we did this year."
If the newsroom wants a new satellite truck or camera equipment during an off year, station managers will say, "Wait until election season." That's a luxury of operating a TV station in a swing state. Stations in solidly red or blue states are out of luck.
But it can be tricky to count on the money coming in during an election, since the swing state map is always in flux. Pennsylvania was one of the most heavily contested states in 2008. This year, political ad spending is virtually nil there. North Carolina wasn't considered a swing state until Barack Obama squeaked out a win in 2008. Now it's one of the lucky few awash in millions of political advertising dollars. Wisconsin saw almost no political advertising early this year, but after Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan entered the race as Mitt Romney's running mate, both campaigns started spending there.
For local advertisers in Colorado Springs, this is a tougher time. When the clash of the titans plays out on your hometown airwaves, the local car dealership or furniture store has little choice but to run for cover.
"In a world of darkness, one man brought illumination to the people he loved," intones a voice at the start of an advertising video. The Colorado marketing firm Vladimir Jones created this spot for an energy client. It won't run on TV anytime soon, though. Instead, it's online.
Jon Bross, the media director for Vladimir Jones, says election season is always a test of his patience — and his flexibility. With TV rates skyrocketing, he has to look elsewhere.
"Digital, cable television are excellent alternatives. Print media only sees, for example, 5 percent of the political ad dollars, so that market is a little bit more open for us," he says. "You simply have to be more creative when the circus comes to town."
General Election Ad Onslaught
Most of the battleground states already have seen more political ads than in all of 2008, according to an analysis from Kantar Media's CMAG. Here's a comparison of the general election cycle through Sept. 19 in each year. Note: 2012 numbers are from April 10, the day Rick Santorum dropped out of the GOP race. The 2008 general election was deemed to have begun on June 29, and 2008 ads are tracked from June 29 to Sept. 19.
| TV Ads Aired | Estimated Spending | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Location | 2008 | 2012 | 2008 | 2012 |
| Cedar Rapids, Iowa | 4,122 | 17,174 | $842,504 | $5,187,850 |
| Dayton, Ohio | 5,389 | 14,707 | $2,280,423 | $6,379,160 |
| Richmond, Va. | 3,157 | 23,326 | $812,265 | $8,338,500 |
| Nationally | 325,607 | 693,819 | $182,564,434 | $394,582,790 |
One Week Of Ads In Swing State Colorado
A look at the volume of TV ads directly related to the presidential race across swing state Colorado, and in the Colorado Springs market specifically, during the same seven-day period, Sept. 13-19, in 2008 and 2012.
| Colorado Springs | All of Colorado | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Location | 2008 | 2012 | 2008 | 2012 |
| All Democratic ads | 323 | 757 | 2,417 | 3,328 |
| All Republican ads | 196 | 688 | 1,886 | 2,334 |
| Barack Obama ads | 323 | 634 | 2,128 | 2,891 |
| John McCain/Mitt Romney ads | 50 | 419 | 585 | 1,283 |
| Total | 519 | 1,445 | 4,303 | 5,662 |
Original Page: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/24/161616073/ads-slice-up-swing-states-with-growing-precision
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Fact or Fiction: A Tale of Two Cons
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Thursday, September 27, 2012
Swing state Survivor: TV ads show three key states - Tampa, Philadelphia & Montgomery Counties - VOTE!!
Swing state Survivor: TV ads show three key states
by Scott Bomboy, blog.constitutioncenter.orgAs the 2012 presidential election kicks into high gear, publicly available numbers on TV campaign ads show that two big battleground states are out of the picture for ad spending, and three states are the primary focus of campaign ads.
Also lurking as difference makers are Nevada, Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina.
Changes allowed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling allow Super PACs and other groups to fund unlimited TV ads. In addition, the GOP and Democrats have raised large stockpiles of campaign cash.
The influx of cash is welcome news to local TV stations that need the money to supplement other volatile ad sources, like ads from makers of automobiles and consumer goods.
So when TV markets don’t see advertising dollars appear of their doorsteps, it can be a crippling blow—and a key indicator of where Barack Obama and Mitt Romney (and their surrogates) have defined the list of final battleground states.
Pennsylvania and Michigan have seemingly dropped off the radar as markets getting any TV political ad spending. Wisconsin also seems to be fading, as a place where campaigns are spending money.
On the Washington Post’s “Mad Money” web site, which tracks weekly TV spending, Philadelphia and Detroit saw $0 in money for the week of September 1 to September 9, the same period where dual political conventions raised awareness of both parties.
The total for the following week for Philly and the Motor City was $0.
The hottest markets for TV spending for the past two weeks continued to be Virginia and Nevada.
Spending in Washington, D.C., which broadcasts to northern Virginia, is outpacing the money flow to the two biggest swing states: Florida and Ohio.
For the week of September 10 to September 16, political groups spent $2.1 in Washington, D.C. on TV ads, which is as much as Orlando and Tampa combined.
Campaigns also spent another $1.2 million in Las Vegas, which was slightly more than Orlando and Tampa, and about equal to Cleveland. Denver also saw more money than Florida, with $1.4 million in local TV ads.
Another $1 million was funneled into southern Virginia, while North Carolina and Iowa saw significant spending.
The takeaway from the TV ad numbers is that Virginia is now the life-or-death battleground for the presidential campaign, and it also has an important U.S. Senate race featuring Tim Kaine and George Allen.
The combined spending in Washington and southern Virginia is now about equal to Florida and Ohio.
The Virginian-Pilot says Hampton Roads, Virginia saw 640 campaign ads in late August and early September, which was not only tops in the state, but in the nation.
In TV talk, Hampton Roads is part of DMA 42, a broadcast region that includes Norfolk and Newport News. So it is the 42nd largest TV market in the country.
A two-part profile from NPR, using an exclusive TV ad analysis, shows four smaller areas that have received huge influxes of cash for ads.
Richmond has seen ad spending jump from $800,000 in 2008 to $8 million in 2012. Other markets targeted by the campaigns include Dayton, Cedar Rapids and Colorado Springs.
In the Quad-Cities area of Iowa and Illinois, one local newspaper estimates the campaigns have spent about $20 per person on TV ads just in Iowa, as of early September.
But in Quad-Cities, which has about 384,000 people, the number is closer to $25 per voter as some Super PACs sympathetic to the GOP have flooded the market with ads.
Scott Bomboy is the Editor-in-Chief of the National Constitution Center.
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GOP could decide to spend heavily closer to Election Day - Ed Rendell lol!!
Video: Ed Rendell speaks to DNC in Charlotte
by Ben Yount, watchdog.orgSeptember 6th
Home > Pennsylvania > Video: Ed Rendell speaks to DNC in Charlotte
Video: Ed Rendell speaks to DNC in Charlotte
By / September 6, 2012 /
Former Pa Gov. Ed Rendell speaks with Pennsylvania Democrats while in Charlotte.
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Presidential Debates
Presidential Debates: Fifty Years of High-Risk TV
cup.columbia.eduINTRODUCTION: The First Presidential Debate
"I should say the most important thing about the business of government and politics is not to bore the people." —Richard Nixon to Jack Paar on The Tonight Show, 25 August 1960
26 September 1960. At exactly 7:30 P.M., a shiny Oldsmobile carrying Vice President Richard M. Nixon pulled into an interior drive at the CBS broadcast facility in downtown Chicago. As with other details surrounding the first presidential debate in history, the timing of Nixon’s arrival at this skating rink turned TV station had been meticulously plotted. Like dueling divas, Nixon and his opponent, John F. Kennedy, would reach the studio a comfortable quarter hour apart.
For Richard Nixon the evening began almost as unpromisingly as it would end. Stepping out of the backseat of the car, he banged his knee sharply and painfully against the door; bystanders waiting to greet him saw the color drain from his face. Just two weeks earlier, the vice president had concluded twelve days of hospitalization for a knee infection caused by a similar mishap with a car door. Almost immediately after his release, Nixon had bounded back onto the campaign trail, hoping to make up for lost time with an intensive schedule of cross-country travel. Now, heading into the most critical media event of his life, he looked exhausted, underweight, and wan—“better suited for going to a funeral, perhaps his own, than to a debate,” in the view of journalist David Halberstam.
At the WBBM loading dock, Nixon quickly composed himself and started through a high-power receiving line. Gathered to greet this fi rst of the star debaters were the titans of American broadcasting: fierce competitors like William Paley of CBS, Robert Sarnoff of NBC, and Leonard Goldenson of ABC, momentarily allied in their patronage of the 1960 debates. Working the line, Nixon came to Oliver Treyz, the president of ABC News, who greeted the candidate by asking what no one else had dared: “How do you feel?”
At a dinner commemorating the debate twenty-five years later, Treyz would recall the moment: “I asked the question because he looked ill. And he said, ‘Not so well. I have a temperature of a hundred and two degrees.’ ” When Nixon pulled from his pocket the bottle of Terramycin he was taking, Treyz asked if he wished to cancel. Nixon declined, saying he did not want to be seen as a coward.
Poor physical health and a freshly injured knee were only the beginning of Richard Nixon’s troubles. For weeks, a more vexing problem had been brewing: a lack of appreciation by campaign decision makers for the momentousness of the occasion. “Nixon knew the power of television very well,” said Ted Rogers, Nixon’s TV adviser, “but I don’t think the people around him did.” According to Rogers, Kennedy’s staff handled their candidate as a thoroughbred, while Nixon’s treated theirs like a mule, “working him to death.” Nixon had turned down an invitation from debate producer-director Don Hewitt for a preproduction meeting; Kennedy used his session to grill the director about staging details. As Hewitt saw it, for Nixon the debate was “just another campaign appearance.”
To prepare for the broadcast, Vice President Nixon studied briefing books alone, dismissing suggestions that he rehearse with aides. Senator Kennedy, by contrast, brought an entourage to Chicago two days ahead of schedule and spent much of the weekend holed up in a hotel suite practicing his responses out loud. In the hours immediately before broadcast, members of Kennedy’s campaign team were still lobbing questions at him.
Fifteen minutes after Nixon’s arrival at WBBM the network executives reassembled to greet the man who would emerge as the evening’s undisputed champion. Unlike his Republican counterpart, John F. Kennedy arrived fit, rested, and ready. Weeks of open-air campaigning around the country had left Kennedy bronzed and glowing. Journalist Howard K. Smith, who moderated the first debate, would compare JFK to an “athlete come to receive his wreath of laurel.” Said Nixon adviser Rogers, “When he came in the studio I thought he was Cochise, he was so tan.”
As Kennedy strode down the long corridor linking the driveway to Studio One, Nixon was already on the debate set, posing for cameramen with an air of jocularity that would quickly evaporate. “Have you ever had a picture printed yet?” Nixon teased one of the photographers, getting a laugh from the group. “You’re always taking them, I never see them printed.” Kennedy’s entrance into the studio a few moments later immediately siphoned attention away from Nixon. “I assume you two guys know each other,” Hewitt cracked, as the rivals extended their hands in greeting. The cameramen clamored for shots of the pair shaking hands; over and over they obliged, their chitchat muffled by the snap of fl ashbulbs.
“You get that tan the way I do?” Nixon asked Kennedy, prefiguring postdebate interest in the candidates’ appearance. “Riding around in open cars? It’s the wind, you know, not the sun.” Though Kennedy’s answer is not recorded, it is apparent from the question that the vice president was struck by how well his opponent looked. Did Nixon sense that his own post-hospital pallor was no match for Kennedy’s summer glow? For weeks, TV consultant Rogers had urged Nixon to use a sunlamp. Like most of Rogers’s advice, the recommendation went unheeded.
After shooing away the photographers, Don Hewitt ushered Kennedy and Nixon to their seats on the debate set for a quick orientation. Footage of this meeting shows Nixon casting his glance at a monitor offscreen, uncomfortably shifting positions in his chair, seeming to pass in and out of a daze. Kennedy, who does not deign to look at Nixon, occupies his side of the studio set with the casual presumption of a lion in his den.
To both debaters Hewitt offered the services of CBS’s top makeup artist, imported from New York for the occasion. When Kennedy said no, Nixon quickly followed suit, in a show of machismo that proved to be a serious tactical blunder. “What I tried to explain to Dick,” Rogers later recalled, “was he has a certain characteristic of his skin where it’s almost transparent. And it was a very nice thought to say ‘I don’t want any makeup,’ but he really needed it in order to have what we would call even an acceptable television picture.”
Nixon himself knew this. Two weeks before the first debate, he spoke of the cosmetic peculiarities of his skin in a TV interview with Walter Cronkite: “I can shave within thirty seconds before I go on television and still have a beard, unless we put some powder on, as we have done today.” Instead of a proper predebate makeup job, an aide slathered Nixon’s face with an over-the-counter cosmetic called Lazy Shave, the same product the vice president had worn in his “kitchen debate” with Nikita Khrushchev a year earlier. Meanwhile, unknown to Nixon, Kennedy got a touch-up from his own people.
In the technical checks that followed, each debater took a final opportunity to sit before the lens for last-minute adjustments. Kennedy advisers examined the shade of their man’s dark suit to make sure an appropriate contrast would be achieved on camera, and a staff person was dispatched back to the hotel for a blue shirt, which the senator donned for the broadcast. Another handler had brought along a pair of long socks, in case regular socks looked too short when the candidates were shown sitting on the set.
If JFK’s tech check was obsessive, the other side’s was fatalistic. Alarmed by Nixon’s on-screen appearance, Hewitt asked Ted Rogers if he approved of the way his debater looked. Although Rogers pronounced himself “satisfied”—resigned might have been a better word— Hewitt felt concerned enough to press the matter with his CBS boss, Frank Stanton. Stanton again asked Rogers if the shots of Nixon were acceptable, and again Rogers said yes.
Exacerbating his misfortune, Nixon had selected a light gray suit, which, according to CBS News president Sig Mickelson, “blended into the background and, if anything, exaggerated his pale appearance.” At the Republicans’ insistence, stagehands repainted the gray backdrop several times in the hours before the debate, but each new coat dried lighter than Nixon’s people had anticipated. As airtime approached, the backdrop was still moist from the latest application.
With less than half an hour to go, both candidates retired to their dressing rooms.
In Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, Jacqueline Kennedy, six months pregnant with her second child, was hosting a debate-watching party. About thirty people had gathered in the Kennedys’ summer home on Nantucket Sound, where the guest list included Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill; Professor and Mrs. Archibald Cox; Professor and Mrs. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; Democratic committeewomen from around New England; and last but not least, about a dozen journalists.
The Kennedy “Listening Party,” as the newspapers anachronistically termed it, offers further evidence of how differently the two political camps regarded the debate. While the wife of the Democratic candidate used the occasion for public relations, Pat Nixon spent a quiet evening watching at home with her two daughters in Washington, out of sight of reporters until the next day, when she would be enlisted for damage control.
The Boston press breathlessly reported every detail of Jacqueline Kennedy’s party on this cool Cape Cod evening: the coffee and pastries in the dining room; the lemon-yellow couch where the hostess perched next to Professor Cox; two-and-a-half-year-old Caroline sleeping upstairs; Jackie’s pearl necklace and coral-colored silk maternity dress. Sensitive to recent press reports about her expensive wardrobe, Mrs. Kennedy assured reporters that the outfit had been sewn by a local seamstress.
Jacqueline Kennedy had rented a sixteen-inch portable television set for the debate. “I own one in Washington,” she told her guests, “but we don’t have one here. I guess I’ll have to break down and buy one.” A Boston Globe photo showed the TV set incongruously situated atop a piece of antique furniture identified as an “early American Governor Winthrop desk.”
As the program drew nearer, Jacqueline confessed to being nervous. “I’m not apprehensive,” she said in the debutante voice the whole country would soon recognize. “But I’m always nervous before he speaks. I must say I have no reason to be.” With partygoers scattered around the room in chairs and on the floor, the moment approached. Mrs. Kennedy herself clicked the set on, took a deep breath, and sat down to watch.
“The candidates need no introduction,” began moderator Howard K. Smith. And for the next hour the country’s first televised presidential debate unfolded, attracting the largest audience that had ever assembled for a political event. An estimated seventy million Americans watched on TV, while several million more listened on radio.
The issues Kennedy and Nixon addressed were familiar to anyone following the news in 1960: communism and national security; labor and farm problems; the candidates’ leadership experience. Though the substance of their remarks would account for most of the ink in the next day’s papers, it was the debaters’ personal characteristics that resonated most strongly with the viewers. “Within hours,” wrote David Halberstam, “no one could recall anything that was said, only what they looked liked, what they felt like.”
In his landmark book The Making of the President, campaign chronicler Theodore White famously limned the contrast between performers: Kennedy “calm and nerveless in appearance,” Nixon “tense, almost frightened, at turns glowering and, occasionally, haggard-looking to the point of sickness.” For Richard Nixon, White concluded, “everything that could have gone wrong that night went wrong.” Media historian Erik Barnouw noted that Kennedy’s “air of confidence” came across not only in his statements and gestures but also, and more crucially, during the cutaway reaction shots: “A glimpse of the listening Kennedy showed him attentive, alert, with a suggestion of a smile on his lips. A Nixon glimpse showed him haggard; the lines on his face seemed like gashes and gave a fearful look.”
What viewers at home could not know was that these same images were igniting a parallel debate in the control room of WBBM-TV, where the issue was not public policy but visual aesthetics. Candidate cutaways had been a flashpoint in the lengthy and contentious predebate negotiations between the campaigns and the networks, but no firm guidelines had emerged as to how the program would be shot. By prior agreement, the candidates’ television representatives sat in the control room during the program: Ted Rogers for Nixon and, for Kennedy, a former WBBM producer named Bill Wilson. With the debate under way, Wilson chided Hewitt that he “owed” Kennedy more reaction shots.
“What do you mean?” Hewitt asked. “I’ve cut away from Kennedy more than I’ve cut away from Nixon.”
But the reaction shots Wilson wanted were of Nixon. The two advisers got into a heated argument with each other and with Hewitt, each side demanding more reactions of the other’s candidate, each keeping a running count of the cutaways. Hewitt was hollering at them both to stop interfering with his work, which, as he saw it, was to serve as a surrogate for people watching in their living rooms. “I didn’t try to catch the candidates in a grimace,” Hewitt later explained. “I listened to the comments and tried to anticipate the public—to switch to a reaction shot when I thought viewers would expect one.” Although Nixon’s close-up cutaways would loom larger in the national perception than Kennedy’s, postdebate tallies showed eleven reactions of Kennedy, running a total of 118 seconds, compared to nine of Nixon, totaling 85 seconds.
The potency of these images may unintentionally have been enhanced by improvements in TV technology. The day before the debate, CBS engineers outfitted the studio cameras with new tubes that delivered a sharper than normal picture. “This was unfortunate for Nixon,” CBS’s Mickelson concluded. “The cameras exaggerated his paleness and heavy beard, but it was a break for Kennedy, who looked robust and healthy. As the cameras had exaggerated Nixon’s apparent ill health, they likewise enhanced Kennedy’s rugged vitality.” An additional visual factor must be considered: as black-and-white broadcasts, the debates exuded a documentary crispness that verged on the hyperreal. Especially when compared to debates from later, color-TV years, the 1960 debates offer the clarity and punch of a Life magazine photo essay come to life.
Beyond production considerations, an eleventh-hour phone call from running mate Henry Cabot Lodge apparently helped steer Nixon onto the wrong tactical course. Lodge, who had debated Kennedy in their senatorial race in 1952, advised Nixon to take the high road and “erase the assassin image” that had dogged him throughout his political career. And so it was that Richard Nixon adopted a posture of conciliation, even deference, toward his fellow debater. “The things that Senator Kennedy has said many of us can agree with,” Nixon declared in his opening statement. “I can subscribe completely to the spirit that Senator Kennedy has expressed tonight.” At one point, the Republican nominee chose to forgo a response altogether, passing up the opportunity to rebut his opponent’s remarks.
“Thank you, gentlemen. This hour has gone by all too quickly.” With this coda from Howard K. Smith, the historic encounter drew to a close. In Texas, Henry Cabot Lodge, the running mate who had counseled gentility in his predebate phone call to Nixon, was heard to say, “That son of a bitch just cost us the election.”
Before leaving the studio, Kennedy and Nixon posed for a final round of photographs, making small talk about travel schedules and weather as the shutters clicked away. Afterward, JFK told an aide that whenever a photographer prepared to snap, Nixon “would put a stern expression on his face and start jabbing his finger into my chest, so he would look as if he was laying down the law to me about foreign policy or communism. Nice fellow.”
Outside the TV station, a crowd of twenty-five hundred political enthusiasts had gathered in the street. Asked by a reporter to estimate the ratio of Democrats to Republicans, a Chicago police officer quipped, “I’d say it’s about twenty-fi ve hundred to zero.” As Nixon slipped out the back, Kennedy triumphantly emerged at the main entrance of the building to greet his supporters. “When it was all over,” Don Hewitt said, “a man walked out of this studio president of the United States. He didn’t have to wait till election day.”
In what history records as the first example of postdebate spin, Jacqueline Kennedy turned to her guests at program’s end and exclaimed, “I think my husband was brilliant.”
For most of the hour, Mrs. Kennedy had watched the debate “almost immobile,” as one observer put it, though she did get up several times to adjust the picture on the temperamental TV set. Others in the highly partisan Kennedy living room broke into laughter when Nixon misspoke and declared, “It’s our responsibility that we get rid of the farmer,” before correcting himself and saying, “the surpluses.” The hostess concealed her reaction to this verbal slip behind a “Mona Lisa-kind of smile.”
Fifteen minutes after the debate ended, the phone rang at the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port: the senator was on the line. Jacqueline took the call upstairs, away from the guests, and reappeared a few minutes later. Her husband had asked about the listening party, she said; otherwise their conversation remained private. One of the reporters present wrote that after the call Mrs. Kennedy was “as flushed with happiness and suppressed excitement as a schoolgirl.”
Richard Nixon’s first indication that the debate had not gone his way came from longtime secretary Rose Mary Woods, a woman he counted among his most honest critics. Shortly after the broadcast, Woods got a call from her parents in Ohio, who asked if the vice president was feeling well. When the debate aired in California, Nixon’s own mother phoned with the same question. And so the reaction went. “I recognized the basic mistake I had made,” Nixon would write in Six Crises. “I had concentrated too much on substance and not enough on appearance. I should have remembered that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ ”
Indeed. In the days that followed, the thousands of words printed about the first Kennedy-Nixon debate would be no match for the pictures that had seared themselves into the nation’s consciousness. Pat Nixon, flying to her husband’s side the next day, gamely told a reporter, “He looked wonderful on my TV set.” Nixon himself assured interviewers that despite a weight loss, he felt fine. Press secretary Herbert G. Klein lamented that “the fault obviously was television,” while other Republicans voiced public displeasure with their candidate’s kid-gloves approach to his opponent.
JFK, on the other hand, reaped an immediate windfall. Theodore White described the change in the crowds that turned out for Kennedy the next day in northern Ohio: “Overnight, they seethed with enthusiasm and multiplied in numbers, as if the sight of him, in their homes on the video box, had given him a ‘star quality’ reserved only for television and movie idols.” Time magazine wrote that before the debate, reporters had amused themselves by counting “jumpers” in the crowds—women who hopped up and down to get a better look at Kennedy. “Now they noted ‘double jumpers’ (jumpers with babies in their arms). By week’s end they even spotted a few ‘leapers’ who reached prodigious heights.”
Although the mythology surrounding the first Kennedy-Nixon broadcast would greatly amplify in the years to follow, the moral of the story has never varied: presidential debates are best apprehended as television shows, governed not by the rules of rhetoric or politics but by the demands of their host medium. The values of debates are the values of television: celebrity, visuals, conflict, and hype. On every level, Kennedy and his team perceived this, while Nixon and his did not.
After Chicago, campaigns would have no choice but to school themselves in the subtleties of the small screen, and eagerly have they taken to the task. “It didn’t matter whether the televised debate had been decisive in Kennedy’s victory,” wrote social critic Todd Gitlin. “What mattered was that the management of television was one factor that candidates believed they could control. The time of the professional media consultant had arrived.”
Today, with the merger of politics and television complete, presidential debates operate as coproductions of the campaigns. Candidates and their handlers dominate every step of the process, from make-or-break issues like participation, schedule, and format, to such arcana as podium placement, camera angles, and which star gets which dressing room. Nothing is unnegotiated, nothing left to chance.
Still, when the red light blinks on to signal the start of the program, the steamroller nature of live TV supersedes the campaigns’ stewardship. Spontaneity is the overriding determinant of presidential debates, and a major reason, perhaps the major reason, that audiences continue to watch in such staggering numbers. “Modern debates are the political version of the Indianapolis Speedway,” according to political scientist Nelson Polsby. “What we’re all there for—the journalist, the political pundits, the public—is to see somebody crack up in flames.”
Presidential Debates: Fifty Years of High-Risk TV will take the reader on a backstage tour through the fractious world of general-election presidential debates, where the perils are enormous and the precautions illusory. We will meet the cast of characters in the behind-the-scenes drama: the candidate-stars, who perform under unimaginable pressure before the largest audiences of their careers; the advisers, who strive to protect them by whatever means necessary; the journalists, who narrate, and reinterpret, their story; the moderators and questioners, who serve as supporting players; the debate sponsors and production crews, who navigate a minefield of politics and egos to bring the programs to air; and the viewers, the ostensible beneficiaries of the exercise, who have been accurately labeled the “forgotten participants.”
We will approach presidential debates as their producers do, traveling along a chronology of preproduction, production, and postproduction, the standard timeline by which all television shows are staged. By definition, the live telecast overshadows all else; but as the experience of 1960 shows, debates are also profoundly influenced by what happens before and after the fact—in the campaign, in the media, in the body politic. Thus, our exploration begins with the predebate period, when rules are hammered out, candidates prepped, and press expectations set, and ends in the postdebate aftermath, when media interpretations and viewer reactions finally wrest control of the event away from the politicians.
With debates approaching their sixth decade as fixtures on the American political landscape, the institution seems fully entrenched while at the same time poised on the brink of change. The debate-heavy primary season of 2007–2008 indicates the extent to which joint TV appearances now function as mandatory stops along the campaign trail, stations of the cross that must be successfully traversed by any candidate hoping to clinch his party’s nomination. The experimental formats used in these primary debates offer a preview of what may lie in store for general-election matchups: YouTube debates in which citizens question candidates via videotape, Spanish-language debates, debates targeted at particular communities of voters, single-topic debates on issues such as the economy. Just as shifting attitudes and technological advancements made the 1960 debates possible, so do new attitudes and technologies have the power to shape debates of the future.
The images of John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon that filled the airwaves on 26 September 1960 can be read as harbingers of change. A revolutionary programming genre burst forth that night in Chicago, one that fundamentally realigned both politics and the media in America. In the decades since Kennedy-Nixon, televised debates have lost none of their fascination for the press and the public, and none of their terror for candidates. Choreographed and unscripted, contrived and authentic, debates straddle the fault line between artifice and reality— like everything else on TV, only more so. With their clashing costars, enormous stakes, and “must-see” status, presidential debates are nothing so much as television writ large.
...
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Published by Columbia University Press and copyrighted © 2008 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. For more information, please e-mail us or visit the permissions page on our Web site.
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About the Author
Alan Schroeder, an associate professor in the School of Journalism at Northeastern University, has written extensively about the relationship between presidential politics and the media. He has also worked as a journalist, television producer, and diplomat.
Original Page: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14104-8/presidential-debates/excerpt
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