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The History of Political Debates · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

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  But look at us. We've made it to the third hour of the morning
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  show with Preston Scott. Good to be with you this morning. Grant Allen
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  running the radio show It Show forty nine ninety three. As we approached show
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  five thousand, raising funds for the WFLA scholarship helping people working their way through
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  school get to the finish line. We have a scholarship set up for people
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  that have a job and are paying their way, and so we want to
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  help them because there's not a lot of help for people like that. And
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  so if you want to help people that are the type of people you want
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  working for you, there you go. It's simple. Just go to the
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  blog paget WFLAFM dot com slash Preston. We are joined by doctor Ed Moore.
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  A little more history here on the radio program. And I lied here.
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  I said it was myths and scandals, and you threw me a curveball.
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  I'm sorry about that. You know, I just got fired up about
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  debates and figured out start looking at some of the history of debates. You
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  know, It's just something happened, something happened in my brain and said,
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  no, start reading about all this stuff. So I am all prepped on
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  all of the myths and scandals in US history, and and and so here
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  he comes. So fine, go ahead, Well you know one of the
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  things what was it got? You started? Just I just started thinking about
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  I mean, you know, I'm getting old, so I've seen a lot
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  of debates, uh, and you start thinking about the history of them and
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  a lot of what ifs. At the end of I think the last hour
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  you were talking about Daniel Boone and going through the Cumberland Gap and where,
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  and it was tough on the film crew. One of my time I started
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  laughing in the car because one of my thoughts was, imagine if we had
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  had televised debates or radio debates that went all the way back. Well,
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  let me ask you, do you think most people would tie the beginning of
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  quote debates to Lincoln Douglas. H No, most people wouldn't even think of
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  that. I mean really, okay, yeah, I think most people go,
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  oh, it was Kennedy Nixon and the first televised debate. And actually
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  it was not the first televised debate, which most people don't realize. Okay,
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  In four years earlier, they decided they were going to have a debate
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  of sorts. It was the Adelais Stevenson against Eisenhower, but neither of them
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  really wanted to do it, so they had surrogates. They actually had a
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  surrogate debate in nineteen fifty six. That was Eleanor Roosevelt debating Margaret Chase Smith,
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  who was a new England senator, and the two of them sat there
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  politely and discussed issues. Can you imagine, you know, it was sort
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  of a PBS kind of a moment, right right, So where did this
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  whole idea of debates begin for us? It started basically with the Kennedy Knicks,
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  the real we're going to do this now, the Kennedy Nixon. But
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  you know, I was just chuckling mentally about if we could go back in
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  time, imagine a debate like with William Howard taft to weigh three hundred and
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  fifty pounds trying to put him up on a stage, or the Lincoln Douglas
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  debates. As you mentioned, Lincoln was six foot four, Stephen Douglas was
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  five feet four, a big, you know platform here in Florida. That
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  kind of a silliness that occurred way back the late fifties or early sixties when
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  Robert King High out of Miami was running and they had to put a little
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  stool under behind the podium so that he could actually see. Over television,
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  it's a visual hot medium, right, and so how people look and how
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  they act. And you think of George H. W. Bush Bush forty
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  one looking at his wrist during the middle of the debate, just seeing what
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  time it was and how big of a deal was made out of that huge
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  It was like, what is he bore? Does he know not? Is
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  he dissenters? How much longer do I have to stand here? Those kinds
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  of things. History is sort of replete with those kind of moments. And
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  if you go back to the sixty debate nineteen sixty with Kennedy and Nixon,
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  you get two very different points of view from people that listen to it on
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  the radio and people that watched it on television. People that listened to it
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  on the radio thought Nixon was one going away. People that watched it on
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  television thought Kennedy one going away because he was young. Nixon had a scowl,
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  much like some of the criticism I've seen this morning of Governor DeSantis.
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  Then he doesn't look like he's happy to be there kind of a thing.
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  It's it's so visual that people don't hear the content as much of what's going
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  on. As watching Ramaswami's giants pepsident smile, you know that, people go,
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  oh, look, he's happy to be there, he's having a good
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  time. Well you ought to be well, yeah, I would have loved
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  to have been up there. Are you have taken shots at one another.
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  But Chris Christie, if you saw the pan when they panned back away,
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  he was kind of leaning down on his desk like he was exhausted. He
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  was leaning on the podium the whole time, and you look like he was
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  almost shrinking behind it. It's so visual it makes a big difference as to
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  how you come across. The only thing I'll say about that and Chris Christie
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  is sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. A little more history with
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  us. Once a month, doctor Edmore joins us. We talk history here
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  on the program. He's the historian emeritus on this show. I have so
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  many titles. Yeah you do, if we were to, I mean,
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  there's there's argument to be made that debates devolved into duels back in the day.
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  But in thinking back. There was no debate with our first president,
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  George Washington, because there was unanimity that he was the guy. And thankfully
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  history tells us he put down the presidency, something that no one thought he
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  would do. Really. Yeah, but moving forward there's contention. Is that
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  the beginning of debate. Yeah, well, that's the nature of the beast
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  of politics and governance is that there's going to be contention. And after Washington,
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  that was a moment of unity that you're sort of president at the creation,
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  So you know, don't no, don't throw any mud on that guy,
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  right Imagine him on television had been kind of awkward. I mean,
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  he had such horribly bad teeth. And you don't know the voices of these
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  people. I mean, it's it's reported like that Lincoln had a very high
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  pitched, kind of screechy voice. You know, you just can't us not
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  good. Let's not do that. James Madison was like five feet four.
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  You were able in those days to have an image of the leader that might
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  not have matched to the reality of what they looked like, and came across
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  some medium changed a lot of that. But yeah, right right after Washington,
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  then we got into some very contentious debates, contentious elections. You know,
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  the Jefferson election was highly content. The Jackson Quincy Adams those, I
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  mean, who've been fantastic to see them. But if you had John Quincy
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  Adams, the ultimate defeat gentleman on the stage with Andrew Jackson probably would have
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  led to some degree of fisticuffs or and it used to happen in the eighteen
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  hundreds on the floor of Congress, and there's a number of episodes of people
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  beating each other with canes, and we've kind of gotten past that now.
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  Now we just lobbed verbal abs at one another. And I kind of wish
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  it was a little more playgroundie. I think it'd be a lot more fun
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  to watch, you know. But it evolved, and it continuously evolved.
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  I mean, you've got to go though all the way into the nineteen twenties
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  because that's when radio first became a normal medium. Warren Harding was the first
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  president to actually go on the radio. He was only in office for a
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  couple of years, but Calvin Coolidge used radio back in the in the nineteen
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  twenties. Fdr Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first one to understand using those as
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  a tool and not so much in the debate world. But he used to
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  radio with his characterized his fireside chats through the depression and then into World War
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  Two, trying to rally the American troops in a sense of we're going to
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  be okay, and using a tool, a method of communication as a way
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  to reach out to people. But you didn't really see any kind of debate
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  stuff. And even when you know, I mentioned that Kennedy Nixon debate in
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  nineteen sixty, when you had the difference between people listening and radio and people
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  listening on TV and what their perceptions were, it wasn't as much how they
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  looked and whatever, I think, as much as it was you had a
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  new generation on the stage with somebody who had been around for a while and
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  they were equals, and people perceived that and said, you know, this
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  younger guy really has got a lot of energy. We may be seeing some
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  of that going on right now in the current events. But then there was
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  not another debate from nineteen sixty all the way to nineteen seventy six. I
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  mean there was a four elections in between where we didn't really have any debates
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  at all. So this is kind of a new phenomenon. Done it all
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  the time. Twenty one minutes after the hour, doctor had more with me,
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  a little more history. We're talking about debates, presidential debates, most
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  notably, you could make the argument that debates went away largely in part to
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  the I guess, the tumult of the sixties and early seventies. Yeah,
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  but you still should have had them. I mean, you could have had
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  them the nineteen sixty eight when Johnson said he was not running. There were
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  a number of people wanting to run seventy two. Certainly I was here in
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  Tallahassee and we probably had fifteen different Democrats running for trying to get that nomination
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  that ultimately went to McGovern come and speak to the legislature here in town.
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  I mean, but they didn't go at it one on one, five on
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  five, whatever they wanted to do, they didn't do it. What brought
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  it back? What I mean, what was the catalyst to bring debates back?
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  Oh? Well, the legal women voters actually got started creating a series
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  of debates that began in nineteen seventy six eighty eighty four, and then the
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  federal government created the Debate Commission. You know, to try to civilize it,
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  and they've gone with all kinds of formats over time. It used to
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  be that you had as many reporters sitting around a table as you did candidates,
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  and it was very confusing. They went down to a moderator. They've
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  done town halls, letting Joe Citizen ask questions, you know, and then
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  you always wonder if it's really Joe citizen. Yeah, whose plant is that?
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  Yeah? But what always strikes me is, last night there wasn't one,
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  and I was looking thinking I was going to come on today. Okay,
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  there was a certain line or somebody got a specific memorable jab that Walter
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  Mondale where's the beef kind of a thing where he really went. Gary Hart
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  was up and coming and Mondale nailed him with the you know, where's the
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  beef? After an old cheeseburger commercial? Right, you get those. The
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  debate in the seventy six between Gerald Ford, who was essentially an appointed president
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  running against this upstart guy from Georgia with no real federal experience Jimmy Carter,
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  and Ford stumbled around under a question about Soviet dominance over Eastern Europe. You
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  know, I mean, you would think he would have not gone that way,
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  and he did like, they're not the Russia is not dominating Eastern Europe,
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  and the moderator at the time, I forget the fellow's name, kind
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  of went, wait, wait, what did you really just say? That?
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  Set it on national television like are you brutt did you say that they
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  don't dominate Eastern Europe? And he had to backtrack, and then that became
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  the whole story out of that debate. Then you had Carter who won.
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  You had Carter then with Reagan in nineteen eighty. Reagan was a Republican out
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  of California movie actor. Everybody knew who he was, so he didn't need
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  the debates to introduce himself to anyone. But he just as you said earlier,
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  he was the king of the one liner. Yeah, Carter came across
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  stiff, wanted to just talk facts and numbers, and because he didn't have
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  much else to talk about on his record, and he didn't have a lot
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  of facts and numbers on his side either, No, but he used them,
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  he tried to effectively use them. And Reagan came across in nineteen eighty
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  with the famous line, well, well there you go again, you know,
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  and he just you know, he knew how to do that. In
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  eighty four he had Mondale and he just knocked it out of the park.
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  But the Mondale debate there was Mondale tried to talk about his age. Now,
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  now think about we've got guys now over eighty or almost eighty. Yeah,
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  Reagan was seventy three at the time. I'm approaching seventy two, so
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  it doesn't seem that darn old to me. But and he was alluding to
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  the age and is he really capable of being president of the United States?
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  And Reagan, smartest guy on the stage, says well, you know,
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  I'm not going to use age the relative youth and inexperience of my opponent and
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  totally blew him away. Turned it around. He just turned it around.
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  So you've had a number of those kinds of things. You had a debate
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  in ninety two, I guess it was with Bill Clint between Bill Clinton and
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  Jerry Brown. Democrats were not clamoring, oddly enough, we're not clamoring to
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  run against Bush forty one because he had just come off the Gulf War.
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  He was extremely popular. He stumbled a bit with his read my lips no
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  new taxes, but you ended up with an unknown governor of Arkansas running against
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  a nutcase former governor of California, and Clinton wiped the floor with him because
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  Hart, I mean, Jerry Brown tried to attack Clinton about using his wife's
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  law firm in Arkansas to make all kind of money, and Clinton used that
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  and said, you know, you don't even belong standing up here compared to
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  my wife, and he got sympathy, went into Super Tuesday and cleaned everybody's
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  clock, and then we end up with Bill Clinton as president. So there
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  are all those moments. You have a prediction. If Joe Biden does somehow,
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  I still don't think he'll be the nominee. But if it's Joe Biden
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  and Donald Trump as the nominees, we will not see any debates. I
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  don't think either of them would want to get on the stage with one another
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  and be subject to mainly the fear of the questions that would come and Biden's
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  inability to handle them. He'd stumble around badly, and Trump would as well,
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  but in a different way. He would not be able to answer the
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  pointed questions in that setting, and he would look in decisive. I think
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  they're going to decide they will not debate neither of them if those two are
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  in fact the nominees. Good to see you, Yeah, good to be
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  here, doctor Ed Moore. More history right here on the Morning Show with Preston Scott