Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 18, 1993 TAG: 9310180040
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
There was the Democratic candidate for governor, in the first critical moments of a televised debate she hoped would resuscitate her faltering campaign, launching into the opening statement she hoped would set the tone for the rest of the evening - and perhaps the campaign.
She looked squarely into the camera, trying to strike just the right timbre in her voice, trying to parse her carefully chosen words just so, when an unexpected problem presented itself . . . a gnat in the studio that kept buzzing in a crazy-eight pattern around her face.
It had to have been a distraction. It was a distraction to me just to watch the tiny creature harass Terry, and I was sitting a good 6 feet away, one of the panelists chosen to question the candidates during the second of their three televised debates.
Yet Terry couldn't do the natural thing - swat the annoying insect away. Just imagine the consternation out in viewerland if a candidate started wildly flapping her arms . . . Instead, Terry determinedly ignored the gnat and pressed onward. Eventually, the insect flew away, drawn to the kleig lights, and viewers at home never suspected a thing.
Of course, there's much even in a televised debate that viewers at home never see.
On the set at Richmond station WRIC, it seemed clear that Terry was performing well. In the first debate, she'd been stiff, dull, sputtering for words. This time, she seemed relaxed, upbeat. For one thing, she was smiling, something she doesn't do nearly enough. Or, as she told an interviewer recently, "I'm not as humorless as I sometimes come across."
Also, this was a talk-show format, not a stand-behind-the-podium debate, and Terry perched on the edge of her seat, leaning into the camera - and the question. She seemed engaged, involved, as if she were sitting in your living room, trying to make her sales pitch to the whole family gathered 'round. Regardless of what you think of Terry politically, in person it seemed an effective presentation.
Yet later, when I reviewed a tape of the debate and watched clips on the television news, my impression was not nearly so favorable.
What was the difference?
On the set, I could read Terry's body language throughout the debate. But the camera caught her only when she was talking - and she doesn't smile when she talks, the way George Allen does.
So the confident, easygoing pose I saw didn't come across to viewers at home; instead, only Terry's somber, serious side. On camera, moreover, her edge-of-the-seat posture came across like she was hunched over, tense and threatening.
No wonder the take among political analysts afterward on who "won" the debate was decidedly mixed.
By contrast, Allen always looks relaxed - sometimes, too much so.
The lanky Republican ambled onto the set and plopped himself down just like he'd picked out an easy chair in your basement rec room. One cowboy-booted foot bobbed on his knee. It was not exactly gubernatorial posture, though I'm not sure what he was supposed to do with such long, gangly legs.
On the set, I thought Allen looked awkward.
But on camera, which caught only a head-and-shoulders view, Allen came across looking distinctly executive, like a young Ronald Reagan - cheerful, steady, reassuring.
So much for first impressions.
Of course, impressions - filtered through the television screen or the newspaper page - are all that most voters have to go by. Tonight, they'll get their best chance yet.
Terry and Allen meet in their final televised debate; in this one they'll be questioned by an audience of 60 undecided voters, much like the town-hall format the presidential candidates used in their Richmond session last fall.
The odds are this will be the best debate yet - if by "best" you mean liveliest. For the two candidates, it may also be the most dangerous.
"Absolutely," says the ubiquitous Larry Sabato, the University of Virginia political analyst who'll serve as a co-moderator of tonight's encounter, which will originate in Richmond. "It's more difficult to restrain the content of questions asked by average people."
Put another way, journalists seem duty-bound to ask deadly serious questions about the state budget and transportation policy. "They're very predictable," Sabato says. But ordinary citizens, gosh, they might say anything - and did during the presidential debate.
Remember the woman who left George Bush speechless - and ultimately unemployed - by asking how he personally was affected by the deficit?
This is such a new style of political debating that the rules of engagement are still being written. Nonetheless, after Clinton's rout of Bush at the University of Richmond last October, some are clear enough.
For starters, in this type of freewheeling discussion, a candidate is never off-camera - so body language can be crucial. "Both staffs may very well snatch the watches of both candidates so they don't commit George Bush's faux pas," Sabato says. A bored Bush, you may recall, was caught glancing at his timepiece during the debate, hoping the whole dreadful event would soon end.
Sabato figures it's also a given that both Terry and Allen will steal a page from Bill Clinton's stage directions and "will get up out of their seats and move toward the audience" in hopes of bonding with the people.
But those are the easy tricks to learn; no doubt, the candidates are already rehearsing them.
The more difficult thing for the candidates to learn, says Virginia Tech political analyst Bob Denton, whose speciality is communication, is how to respond. Stylistically, he says, this town-meeting debate forces candidates to answer questions differently.
"It requires a shift from a public-speaking style to an interpersonal communications style," Denton says. "We're also noticing it requires a feminine style more than a masculine style, more self-disclosure, more personal example."
The town-meeting format is so personal that it tends to stifle attack-dog politics; and lately it's been Terry, not Allen, who's been on the offensive.
Dwayne Yancey has covered politics for this newspaper since 1985.
TONIGHT'S DEBATE between George Allen and Mary Sue Terry airs at 7 on WSLS (Channel 10) and public radio station WVTF (89.1 FM)
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB