Fans (or paid agitators?) of LaRouche, a perennial candidate who was not invited to take part, interrupted the debate five times. At each cascade of shouting, the candidate who had the floor just stopped talking and stood there waiting for security guards to remove the nuisance (roughly, in some cases). At one point, when Sen. Joe Lieberman got interrupted midsentence, he let out a whiny “Oh, come on!”
Finally, Sharpton took the troublemakers on. “We are not at all going to tolerate the continual breakup of what we are trying to say here to the American people,” he shouted back (of course, he always sounds like he’s shouting). “You’re going to respect us on this stage because we’ve got something to say.” To that, Lieberman replied: “Amen.” Sharpton quipped back: “I take that as an endorsement.” There are so few unscripted moments at these debates nowadays, that as annoying as the LaRouche people were, they provoked the most impromptu moment of the debate.
Nearly everything Tuesday night was staged. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean was wearing what looked like a nametag on his lapel. It turned out to be a pro-union sticker for a local shop trying to organize at Morgan State University, where the debate was held. Dean is in a fierce competition with Rep. Richard Gephardt for the AFL-CIO’s endorsement. Many candidates come loaded with quips, like Sen. John Edwards’s comment that they should hang a banner in front of the White House that reads HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH. Or Sen. Bob Graham’s “Osama bin Forgotten.”
The best thing about covering a debate is not the event itself, but mixing it up with the candidates and their phalanx of aides who hang around chatting up any reporter who will listen. You can work for a zero-wattage radio station in Fargo and Sen. John Kerry will talk to you–a lot. During the debate, reporters watch it on TV screens in another room. Afterward, they file into the “spin room,” as it is bluntly called. “In the last 10 years the prespin and postspin have become so institutionalized at these debates that we’re all being spun silly,” says Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post’s media critic and author of the book “Spin Cycle.”
For instance, viewers saw the war of words over U.S.-Israeli policy between Dean and Lieberman, the only contender who really went after Dean. But the media also got treated to the war of press releases. After Lieberman criticized Dean for having called for even-handedness in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–and Dean hit back saying his policy was no different than President Clinton’s–the paper started flying around the pressroom.
First came the predebate prepared memos. Clearly both sides knew the issue would come up. Dean’s first round condemned the recent suicide attacks in Israel and went on to talk about the “historic, special relationship” between Israel and the United States. Then Lieberman’s staffers started handing out quotes from Dean saying that he would not “take sides” in the Middle East conflict. Somewhere, aides were typing and photocopying frantically. The next round in the paper war was obviously whipped up on the spot. “Dean expresses disappointment in Lieberman attacks; reaffirms support for Israel and for peace,” his memo declared. To which the Lieberman people responded with a quote from Clinton that appeared to disavow evenhandedness and proclaimed: “Only Israelis can make final decisions.”
Even after the debate, there was plenty of political calculation that went into just how long a candidate should stick around in the spin room before he or she looked desperate. The top tier split pretty quickly. There is an inevitable indignity to the after-debate spin. Candidates line up under cardboard posts bearing their names. There is always a huge scrum around the front runner, while lesser-known candidates like Rep. Dennis Kucinich look eagerly to the sparse few who grace their rope line. “No one else is saying, ‘Stop this war now!’” Kucinich told me. He was the only other hard hitter of the evening. He took on Gephardt, who kept trying to show his leadership and expertise by talking about all the meetings he’d had with the president about the war. “Dick, I just want to say when you were standing in the Rose Garden with the president and you were giving him advice, I wish you would have told him no,” Kucinich said.
Toward the end of the evening, just a few stragglers were left: Kucinich, Carol Moseley Braun, Lieberman and Graham, who seemed to be sidling up to Lieberman in order to share his media attention. Finally, Lieberman seemed to get annoyed and moved down the line, taking his pack of reporters with him. But most of the reporters were more interested in milling around actor George Clooney, who was there with director Steven Soderbergh filming for their new HBO series called “K Street.” The most gracious act of the evening that I saw was the soft-spoken actor turning down requests for interviews so as not to distract from the political theater at hand.
