How Not to Stage a Debate

The geniuses at ABC TV did everything wrong, spending the first hour of the Democratic debate on nasty trivia, butchering the continuity of both hours with endless commercials and having their moderators badger the candidates to the point of interrupting their answers to argue with them.

For fully half the time, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos harped on Jeremiah Wright and sniper fire in Bosnia, adding to the ugly mix a former member of the Weather Underground with a marginal connection to Obama. The premise seemed to be that Republicans would run a Karl Rovian smear campaign against one of them in the fall, so why not preview it now?

Obama protested that American voters would not succumb to those tactics in a year when they faced serious problems, but Clinton seemed eager enough to roll in the mud under the high-minded pretense of discussing "character."

In the second hour, when the questions became substantive, on Iraq and the economy, Hillary Clinton was at her sure-handed best while Obama gave cogent enough answers but seemed a little weary of suppressing his anger and dealing with Gibson's gotcha questioning.

The dismal two hours started with a suggestion from Mario Cuomo, the best president we never had, that the candidates promise now to run on the same ticket, regardless of who wins. They refused, of course, but if the campaign continues along the lines set by ABC last night, it might be impossible to get them into the same room by convention time.

"Primary Colors II"

In the climactic scene of the movie from the Anonymous Joe Klein novel, John Travolta-Jack Stanton-Bill Clinton importunes a young, idealistic African-American young man, "We can do incredible things. We can change this country. I'm gonna win this thing. Look me in the eye, Henry, and tell me that you don't want to be a part of it."

In the sequel, Henry has morphed into Barack Obama, and he is still in it, this time not as part of the steamroller but as its target.

In an early scene of the original, a politician talking to the candidate asks the aspiring First Lady, "You don't mind us talking business, do you?" and she answers wryly, "No, no. How else could I learn?"

As we play out "Primary Colors II," how much has Emma Thompson-Susan Stanton-Hillary Clinton learned? The moral dilemma of the original--whether or not to destroy the opposition with dirt--has been transmuted into a team operation to smear Barack Obama with mud about drug use, doubts about his opposition to the war in Iraq and accusations of racial opportunism.

The 1998 movie was in theaters during the impeachment and left viewers with mixed feelings about the ruthless charmer who connected with Americans by feeling their pain while inflicting some of his own on them. Now the whole cast is back, and after years of the George Bush horror movie, the audience may be looking for something a little more elevating.

Republican Perfection Police

In defending his client from the latest smear-by-whisper in the '08 campaign, John McCain's lawyer says he “was the victim of false, vicious rumors about his personal life” during the 2000 South Carolina primary, and that “rumors and gossip damaged his campaign and may have cost him the election.”

So the spirit of Karl Rove lives on in whatever dirt is at the bottom of Matt Drudge's "revelations" about a story McCain's people have tried to persuade the New York Times not to publish.

In the Republican moral universe, human frailty is a disqualification for President, so the last two candidates standing are Mike Huckabee, the man of God, and Mitt Romney, he of the unblemished personal life.

For a while, his 9/11 aura kept Rudy Giuliani afloat, but the weight of personal imperfections finally dragged him down in the polls, and Fred Thompson has not shown enough orthodox Republican zeal to make up for his actorish womanizing and trophy wife,

In their neo-Victorian fervor, the GOP gave us the exemplary personal life of George W. Bush as an antidote to Bill Clinton's waywardness, and now it seems that nothing less will do for '08.

As the protagonist of Jean Anouilh's "Waltz of the Toreadors" observed about the original Victorians, propriety demanded that couples be seen serenely swimming through life side by side and, if there was a need to relieve oneself, it had to be done under the water, out of sight.

Today's Republicans are keeping that ethos alive with a vengeance.

Blackening Obama

As the polls dwindle down, Hillary Clinton's supporters are performing what they delicately call "the political equivalent of a proctology exam on the opposition" by pelting Barack Obama with slime and hoping some of it will stick.

Twisting old news about real estate deals, drug use and (shades of Nixon) slush funds into attacks on his character that might make Karl Rove blush, they are topping it off with accusations that Obama's campaign is importing college students to vote illegally in the Iowa caucuses.

A Clinton national co-chairman is spreading word about possible problems from Obama's youth that Republicans could use if he is the Democratic nominee.

"It'll be, 'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?'" he told the Washington Post. "There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks"

Meanwhile, the "Hillary is 44" attack crew is dredging for every bit of gossip about "Obama’s myriad real estate deceptions and transactions" and other alleged "lies."

Conservative smearmaster Robert Novak is helping stir the pot. Last month he provoked a Clinton-Obama spat with a report that "agents" of the Clinton campaign had been "spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent."

Today he spotlights an accusation on "Face the Nation" last Sunday that Obama is illegally spreading money from a Nixon-like fund to bolster political support and shoots it down by claiming the PAC fund "contributed to Clinton's 2006 Senate reelection and, in the current cycle, to Jeanne Shaheen's Senate campaign in New Hampshire, even though her husband, Bill Shaheen, heads that state's Clinton campaign."

The days are growing shorter in Iowa and New Hampshire, and more than one kind of darkness is setting in.