When I entered the race, the comment looked wishy-washy and slick. Al’s strategy was to hit back briefly on Quayle’s attacks and keep talking about our positive plans for America. His best line was in response to Quayle’s support for congressional term limits, a pet cause for conservatives: “We’re fixin’ to limit one.”
Two nights later, on October 15, we had the second debate, in Richmond, Virginia. This was the one I wanted, a town hall meeting where we would be questioned by a representative group of local undecided voters.
My big worry this time was my voice. It was so bad right before the first debate that I could hardly speak above a whisper. When I had lost it during the primary, I saw a specialist in New York and got a voice coach, who taught me a set of exercises to open my throat and push the sound up through my sinus cavities. They involved humming; singing pairs of vowels, back to back, always beginning with
Carole Simpson of ABC News moderated the debate with questions from the audience. The first question, about how to guarantee fairness in trade, went to Ross Perot. He gave an anti-trade answer. The President gave a pro-trade response. I said I was for free and fair trade and we needed to do three things: make sure our trading partners’ markets were as open as ours; change the tax code to favor modernizing plants at home rather than moving them abroad; and stop giving low-interest loans and jobtraining funds to companies that move to other countries when we didn’t provide the same assistance to needy companies at home.
After trade we went to the deficit, then to negative campaigning. Bush hit me again for demonstrating against the Vietnam War in England. I replied, “I’m not interested in his character. I want to change the character of the presidency. And I’m interested in what we can trust him to do and what you can trust me to do and what you can trust Mr. Perot to do for the next four years.”
After that, we discussed a series of issues—the cities, highways, gun control, term limits, and healthcare costs. Then came the question that turned the debate. A woman asked, “How has the national debt personally affected each of your lives? And if it hasn’t, how can you honestly find a cure for the economic problems of the common people if you have no experience in what’s ailing them?” Perot went first, saying the debt caused him to “disrupt my private life and my business to get involved in this activity.” He said he wanted to lift the debt burden from his children and grandchildren. Bush had a hard time saying how he had been affected personally. The questioner kept pushing him, saying she’d had friends who had been laid off, who couldn’t make their mortgage and car payments. Then, strangely, Bush said he’d been to a black church and read in the bulletin about teen pregnancies. Finally, he said it’s not fair to say you can’t know what a problem is like unless you have it. When my turn came, I said I’d been governor of a small state for twelve years. I knew people by name who had lost their jobs and businesses. I’d met a lot more in the last year all over the country. I had run a state government and seen the human consequences of cuts in federal services. Then I told the questioner that the debt was a big problem, but not the only reason we had no growth: “We’re in the grip of a failed economic theory.” At one point during these exchanges, President Bush made a bad moment worse for himself by nervously looking at his watch. It made him seem even more out of touch. Though we moved on to other matters, like Social Security, pensions, Medicare, America’s responsibilities as a superpower, education, and the possibility of an African-American or a woman being elected President, the debate was essentially over after our answers to the woman’s question about the personal impact of the debt on us. President Bush was effective in his closing statement by asking the audience to think about who they wanted to be President if our country faced a major crisis. Perot spoke well about education, the deficit, and the fact that he’d paid more than a billion dollars in taxes, “and for a guy that started out with everything he owned in the trunk of his car, that ain’t bad.” I began by saying that I had tried to answer the questions “specifically and pointedly.” I highlighted Arkansas’ programs in education and jobs and the support I had from twenty-four retired generals and admirals and several Republican businesspeople. I then said, “You have to decide whether you want change or not.” I urged them to help me replace “trickle-down” economics with “invest- and-grow” economics.
I loved the second debate. Whatever questions they had about me, real voters most wanted to know about things that affected their lives. A CBS News post-debate poll of 1,145 voters said 53 percent of them thought I had won, compared with 25 percent for Bush and 21 percent for Perot. Five debate coaches interviewed by the Associated Press said that I had won, based on style, specifics, and my obvious comfort level with a format I’d been working with throughout the campaign, and long before that in Arkansas. I liked direct contact with citizens, and I trusted their unfiltered judgment. As we headed into the third debate, a CNN/
Hillary and I went into Ypsilanti with our crew a day early to prepare for the last debate on the campus of the Michigan State University in East Lansing. As they had for the two previous debates, Bob Barnett and Mike Synar put me through my paces. I knew this would be the roughest ride for me. President Bush was a tough, proud man who was finally fighting hard to hold on to his job. And I was sure that, sooner or later, Perot, too, would turn his fire on me.
More than 90 million people watched the last debate on October 19, the largest audience we had drawn. We were questioned half the time by Jim Lehrer, half the time by a panel of journalists. It was President Bush’s best performance. He accused me of being a tax-and-spend liberal, a Jimmy Carter clone, and a waffler who couldn’t make up his mind. On the waffling issue I had a pretty good retort: “I can’t believe he’s accused me of taking two sides of an issue. He said ‘trickle-down economics is voodoo economics’ and now he’s its biggest practitioner.” When he hit the Arkansas economy, I got to reply that Arkansas had always been a poor state, but in the last year we were first in job creation, fourth in the percentage increase in manufacturing jobs, fourth in the percentage increase in personal income, and fourth in the decline in poverty, with the second-lowest state and local tax burden in the country: “The difference between Arkansas and the United States is that we’re going in the right direction and this country’s going in the wrong direction.” I said that, instead of apologizing for signing the deficit-reduction plan with its gas-tax increase, the President should have acknowledged that his error was in saying “Read my lips” in the first place. Perot took us both on, saying he had grown up five blocks from Arkansas and my experience as governor of such a small state was “irrelevant” to presidential decision making, and accusing Bush of telling Saddam Hussein that the United States would not respond if he invaded northern Kuwait. We both whacked him back.
The second half of the debate featured questions by the panel of journalists. On the whole, it was more structured and less feisty, a bit like the first debate. However, there were some made-for-TV moments. Helen Thomas of United Press International, the senior White House correspondent, asked me: “If you had it to do over again, would you put on the nation’s uniform?” I said I might answer the draft questions better, but I still thought Vietnam was a mistake. I then noted that we’d had some pretty good non-veteran Presidents, including FDR, Wilson, and Lincoln, who opposed the Mexican War. When I said Bush had made news in the first debate by saying he would put James Baker in charge of economic policy, but I would make news by putting myself in charge of economic policy, Bush got off a good line:
“That’s what worries me.” The three of us brought the debates to an end with effective closing statements. I thanked the people for watching and caring about the country, and said again that I wasn’t interested in attacking anyone personally. I complimented Ross Perot on his campaign and raising the profile of the deficit. And I said of President Bush, “I honor his service to our country, I appreciate his efforts, and I wish him well. I just believe it’s time to change…. I know we can do better.”
It’s hard to say who won the third debate. I did a good job defending Arkansas and my record, and in discussing the issues, but I may have qualified too many of my answers. I had seen enough Presidents who had to change course to want my hands tied later by blanket statements in the debates. With his back against the wall, President Bush did well on everything except his attack on my record in Arkansas; that would work only in an unanswered paid ad, where the voters couldn’t hear the facts. He was better at questioning what kind of President I
