CRITICISM ABOUT DEBATE ISSUE

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30528, 25 August 1964, Page 15

CRITICISM ABOUT DEBATE ISSUE

(From FRANK OLIVER, N.Z.PA. Special Correspondent) NEW YORK, August 23. When Congress took action which makes it virtually certain there will be no public debate this year between Presidential candidates it was President Johnson and not Congress who was criticised.

It may have been wise politics, but it was poor public policy, said one newspaper, and “overt political considerations, not concern for the public good,” said another.

But that’s how the President wants it and presumably how he will get it.

In recent years radio and television have played such important roles in American electioneering that one wonders how elections were conducted in the days before they existed. Just consider the task. There are almost 190 m people in the country and it covers more than three and a half million square miles. How does a candidate cover that space and make contact with that many people in the nine weeks the campaign will last? When, in 1960, Mr Kennedy and Mr Nixon held their series of debates on the issues these debates were hailed as a great step forward in the business of communication between the principal candidates and the electorate. They had, said almost every commentator and newspaper, set a precedent that could never be ignored. Well, four years later it is being ignored by a man who, many believe, owes his position first as Vice-President and then as President, to the fact that those debates gave his ticket that slight edge over the opposition. TABLE BILL The “New York Times” said senior Democrats were clearly deferring to the President’s “assessment of his own political interests” when they voted to table a bill which would have suspended the equal-time requirement and thus clear the way for a direct confrontation before a national audience.

Many are asking why the President is avoiding debates in 1964, a year in which they could have been especially useful as one writer has said, in view of Senator Goldwater’s apparent determination to avoid news conferences and “his propensity for repudiating or re-interpreting his previous remarks.” The President must have known that his failure to appear in television debate would hurt him with many people and in consequence some people have jumped to the conclusion that maybe his performance in such a debate

might hurt him more. Mr Johnson was in Congress many years, first in the House and then in the Senate, but he never established himself as an effective cut and thrust debater. He was the expert parliamentarian and manipulator, the man who was persuasive in the aisles and the corridors rather than in debate in the chamber. “TOO FLUENT”

Senator Goldwater is much more used to debate and when on his feet is articulate and fluent, perhaps too fluent in view of the fact' that he so often has to explain later what he meant. Some feel the President is perhaps under-rating himself as a debater. He certainly handles himself very well at

a news conference and parries and thrusts pretty well with the hard-hitting reporters. Anyhow, it seems he is not going to take the risks of debate.'

I T e is being most sharply criticised by the Republican hierarchy of course but for his decision he can, ironically enough, quote his Republican opponent. Before his nomination Senator Goldwater said he thought the President of the United States should not enter into debate with his opponent. Then the Senator went on to refuse more than once to debate party issues with Governor Scranton, so it illbecomes him now to criticise the President’s decision. The real losers are the electorate. As the “New York Times” has said, it is in the public interest that a Presidential campaign should approach as nearly as possible a coherent and responsive dialogue between the candidates

Televised debates, as 1960 demonstrated, are valuable in the development of such a dialogue and many here feel the President has put, unfortunately, ■ a limit on the evidence on which the electorate can judge the nominees. EQUAL TIME The device used to prevent the debate was the suspension of what is known as the “equal-time requirement” in television. In this highly democratised nation there is, many feel, a little bit too much democracy sometimes. As everyone knows there are but two major parties in the State. In every national election there are at least 10 or a dozen “crank” candidates. Any man, if he fulfils certain legal conditions, can “run for President,” knowing he may get only a few thousand votes or maybe only a hundred or two.

There is always a prohibition candidate, for instance, and usually an independent Afro-American, a constitutional candidate and an antitax candidate. The law says if one candidate is given time on air and television then other candidates shall have equal time. Thus, unless the equal-time law is temporarily suspended all networks would have to give national time to all crank candidates and the whole thing would be reduced to a farce. The networks cannot tell a crank candidate to go jump in the lake. The simple expedient of failing to suspend the equaltime provision put JohnsonGoldwater television debates out of the window, and the electorate will not have a chance to judge the candidates side by side in their effort to make up their minds which is the better qualified to be the spokesman for his nation before the world, as one newspaper has said.