The 1992 Campaign & Debates

An Interview with President Bush

An Interview with President Clinton

An Interview with Vice President
Quayle

An Interview with Admiral Stockdale

MR. MacNEIL: With us specially tonight -- specially because it's Monday night -- our team of analysts, David Gergen, editor at large of U.S. News & World Report, and columnist Mark Shields, who is in Portland, Oregon, tonight. David, what did you think of our people's reaction to the debate?

MR. GERGEN: Fascinating. I thought they presented such an interesting insight into, I think, the American people's reaction in general, and it seemed to me very much, Robin, that the debate instead of changing people's views reinforced their views going in. That, of course, is the classic response in American history, in the debates we've had since 1960. It's only been the rare debate that's changed people's minds. This debate apparently did not. Most people stuck where they were. That's good news for Bill Clinton because he maintains the lead that he has. I think that Bill Clinton has to take some pause here that with some of these voters he clearly hasn't closed the sale yet. He hasn't quite -- he hasn't sealed their real heart-felt approval even though they may get his vote, and he's going to need that if he's going to be president.

MR. MacNEIL: That was different, Mark, wasn't it? If that's true, that's different from what happened in 1960, the first debate, Kennedy/Nixon, when a lot of people with a relatively inexperienced Democratic senator who many people regarded as callow, that first debate really changed a lot of minds, didn't it, about him?

MR. SHIELDS: It certainly did, Robin. John Kennedy could not have been elected president without the debates in 1960. I don't think there's any question about that. And it shook up a lot of people in 1984, if you'll recall the first debate, when David's former mentor, Ronald Reagan, was wandering down the Pacific Coast Highway in the closing moments and people thought that perhaps the geriatrics ward was next. And that race became close. It didn't happen last night. I think people's impression of Ross Perot did change dramatically, though.

MR. MacNEIL: Do you -- did it strike you -- it did me, listening to Charlayne's guests here -- and these are people she's talked to carefully, individually throughout the campaign, most of them, that they are less ready than the professional commentators and the newspaper editorial writers, and everybody else, to say so and so won, or so and so lost, or it was a clear victory for this? What - - Mark, what do you think about that?

MR. SHIELDS: I think that they were perhaps more thoughtful and reflective than -- than those of us who rushed to resolution.

MR. MacNEIL: Of course, you have to make a living doing this.

MR. SHIELDS: Well, if I sat there, Robin -- and this and that - - you'd probably say, Mark, why don't you come back three months from now, but, you know, where David and I are hired to make fools of ourselves, but as --

MR. GERGEN: Speak for yourself.

MR. SHIELDS: But, no, I think -- I think that they were very thoughtful, very reflective, and I think it does -- I mean, David said earlier -- the sale has not been sealed. It -- people have decided, I believe, that George Bush is not their guy. They don't want to rehire George Bush but there is not an enthusiasm, there is very little jumping through hoops, and doing hand stands for Bill Clinton at this point.

MR. MacNEIL: Any surprises in the wider reaction today that you have absorbed around the country, polls, comments, political spin, whatever?

MR. GERGEN: Well, Mark I think raised the right question. The big surprise in the debate was Ross Perot, and I think all of us have been trying to -- have been waiting overnight to see how -- how much of an impact he would have -- very strong debate performance, very folksy, used the vernacular very well. I think he spoke to people in their hearts more than the other two candidates. What the polls show, Robin, is -- as much as we saw in Charlayne's interview -- is that two of the three polls that have been taken show that people think that Ross Perot won the debate. A third poll shows that Bill Clinton won, but Ross Perot was a close second. Unfortunately for the president, in all three polls, he comes in third.

But what's very striking though is that even though the polls show that Ross Perot won the debate, there is not a huge bump for him. There is some bump, not enough to really make a difference yet in the race. He goes from about 10 points, maybe 8 points, to about 15. Now -- and he possibly in the next two debates could reinforce that and raise those numbers. In some ways, you begin to wonder if the Bush campaign secretly would like Ross Perot to get up to about twenty-five or thirty percent in the polls and maybe they could win it that way.

MR. MacNEIL: Mark, what did you think of the general reaction today? I know you were on an airplane most of the day, but --

MR. SHIELDS: No -- I was, I mean, but I think what we saw most of all was -- was this kind of a headline as in the Portland Oregonian, which seemed to be --

MR. MacNEIL: Hold it up a second again.

MR. SHIELDS: Excuse me.

MR. MacNEIL: We didn't have time to read it.

MR. SHIELDS: No knockdowns, no knockdowns. Political writers, whenever there's a major political event, we invariably return to sports metaphors, and there were no runs, no extra base hits, no errors last night, no fumbles, no interceptions, and no knockdowns and knockouts.

But I think the Perot thing, I just want to take a slight dissent from David, I think Perot was more than folksy and vernacular. I think Ross Perot did something last night that nobody's done in this campaign, and I think may account for a lack of enthusiasm. Ross Perot treated voters like grown-ups. Ross Perot actually was asked about a tax increased that he's endorsed. He not only admitted he'd endorsed it. He defended it. He championed it and put it in terms, Robin, that haven't been heard much in this campaign that that is each of us has an obligation to our community and all of us have an obligation to the next generation. And I think he is sort of the personification of what people don't like about the opposite of what people don't like about politics. He's not a professional politician. He's not part of the money chase. He's not part of the political system. He's not the -- he's a guy who talks about what people are worried about, that their education system is -- educating their children -- that we are a nation that's lost control of its economic destiny. I think he's addressing real things. It's more than just one-liners.

MR. MacNEIL: David.

MR. GERGEN: Well, I think a lot of people, Mark, enjoy the comments. A number of people I talked to felt that he was a bit simplistic at times, and I'm not sure were ready to make a jump for him, but equally important, what he did, he helped himself a lot last night, Robin, but I think he also helped Bill Clinton a great deal. Two or three times when the president was on the attack, it was Perot who came to the defense and made a very effective defense. Example, when the president went after the Vietnam experience of Bill Clinton, it was Perot who said you should distinguish between what someone does as a boy --

MR. MacNEIL: One our voters just echoed that, picked up on that today. And also perhaps indirectly where he wasn't -- it wasn't quite as explicit by, for instance, making the joke about, well, experience, I don't have the experience of creating --

MR. SHIELDS: Exactly right.

MR. MacNEIL: -- a $4 trillion deficit. Let me ask --

MR. SHIELDS: If you hate people, I don't want your vote is a pretty strong statement too.

MR. MacNEIL: If I may, let me ask you about the -- the news that Mr. Bush made -- it seemed so casually during the debate yesterday -- that Jim Baker, the man for all tasks and seasons, is going to come as a kind of a domestic policy czar and coordinate the -- the new economic plan if Bush is re-elected. What do you think about that, David, and the impact it's had and likely to have? Because there's been a lot more to come out today from unnamed officials at the White House who said the old economic team is going to be thrown out.

MR. GERGEN: You mean about Deputy President Baker, now think about that. I -- I have believed for some time that if the president laid out an economic plan and named Jim Baker as his economic czar for the second term, that would help his re-election efforts. I thought it would have been a lot more effective had he done that in September. I think coming this late and being done in such an off-handed way in this debate did not make much of an impact. It seemed rushed. And after all, only a few days ago, this same president told Larry King that Jim Baker was going to be a Secretary of State in the second term. Now the question is out there -- the way I interpret what he's saying, Robin, what the president's saying is, if I'm re-elected, Jim Baker's going to be my economic czar in the short haul, and then he's going to go back to the State Department after three or four months, after we get the team in place, the plan in place, et cetera. But I don't think it had the political impact the White House may have thought. There are various indications in the White House today that we're going to hear a great deal more about this from the president in the next few days. They're, in fact, going to come back and try to sell this economic plan a lot harder.

MR. MacNEIL: And that Baker is going to make a big speech about he's going to implement it.

MR. GERGEN: Exactly.

MR. MacNEIL: Mark, what did you think about this? I noticed that Baker, himself, told CNN the reason for doing this seemed very candid, people think Bush's agenda for renewal is all political, this is a quote -- is all political -- "He's only doing it because he's running for re-election." Now, if that was the perception before, will this move also be perceived that way?

MR. SHIELDS: Well, every -- every move in a campaign is discounted somewhat, but I think it really becomes the -- the message of the Bush campaign is re-elect George Bush and you'll get Jim Baker. I think there's probably a crash program at NIH, National Institute of Health, trying to clone Jim Bakers at this point. He's the one guy that can handle the world, the one guy that can handle America, and I guess George Bush's most valuable player. I don't under estimate his -- his talents or his abilities. But I think when you start tossing people overboard, as the -- the reports out of the White House today suggested, that Darman and Nick Brady won't have parking spaces -- Dick Darman, the budget director, and Nick Brady, the Secretary of the Treasury, will not have assigned parking spaces after January 20, 1993, if George Bush is re-elected, I think that has about the whiff of desperation.

MR. MacNEIL: Also, that's something that his conservative critics within the Republican Party have desperately wanted for months, isn't it, not something that is to the general voter --

MR. GERGEN: Absolutely. And in some ways this is really inside the beltway kind of stuff, but there was a series in the Washington Post last week by Bob Woodward that portrayed the inner workings of the economic team with a lot of back stabbing and people, you know, arguing with each other, and frankly being disloyal to the president. I think that had the Republican Party stalwarts on their ears last week, saying this should not be permitted, these people should all go. They're not only giving you a bad economic policy, but they are now building their own reputations at the president's expense. So I have a feeling that what's been coming out of the White House in the last 24 hours has a great deal to do with what that -- that Post series, as well as the election.

MR. MacNEIL: Mark, finally, this -- this question -- let's discuss whether there will be a job, any job for Jim Baker after November. Is -- is there still -- given the state of the polls and the results of last night's debate, is there still a winning scenario for George Bush? Has anybody done what he has to do in the next three weeks?

MR. SHIELDS: Well, I think last night we talked that he had a hat trick facing him, that he had -- had to be presidential, he had to lay out a different sense of a second term that was different from the first, and he had to brush off Bill Clinton. I think one can make a case that he did the first two, that George Bush was more coherent, more consistent in his presentation. He seemed very much in control of himself and comfortable, but he didn't lay a glove on Bill Clinton, and I don't see how Bush is going to win this. David's earlier concern or mention that the Bush people cited that Ross Perot could get to twenty-five or thirty, if Ross Perot gets to 30, George Bush might be at 28.

MR. MacNEIL: Is there still a winning scenario?

MR. GERGEN: Not that I can see. It may be they're very creative, maybe they can pull it out still. It would help if they took these debates more seriously than they did. I don't think they went into this debate last night looking for a victory. The president went in trying to be presidential as opposed to taking it away from Bill Clinton. He was not on the offensive. Bill Clinton was on the offensive. The president didn't have a plan. He didn't have a message. He has to find that in these last two debates. He will be playing to a diminished audience. But if he comes on strong Thursday night, if Quayle gives a surprising performance Tuesday night, and the expectations are very low, so Quayle could possibly do quite well, possibly the country will wake up, but if he gives two more debate performances as he did last night, it's over. You know, it may be too early to go looking for a new job, if you're working in the White House, but you should be polishing up your resume.

MR. MacNEIL: Well, David Gergen, Mark Shields, thanks both.