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player ready...Ted Forstmann and Jim Gitz deserve plaudits for tilting at windmills.
Very different people, they are straining to juice up the 2000 presidential campaign in ways that are, respectively, very modern and very old-fashioned.
They seek our attention so they can entice Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush.
In the process, they are challenging reigning orthodoxy about how the political game should be played.
And that’s why they’ll probably fail.
Before learning of the gambits they are proposing to Gore and Bush, mull the ways citizens in our democracy might try to elevate public discussion–or at least get big television ratings–during the campaign for its top office.
Maybe, just maybe, pitcher John Rocker and Al Sharpton can join forces and sponsor a bona fide presidential debate between Gore and Bush on the subject of racial tolerance.
Or perhaps Bobby Knight and Mike Tyson could sponsor a 60-minute faceoff between Bush and Gore on the pros and cons of temper control.
Failing that, what about Regis Philbin and the last person left on CBS’ “Survivor” teaming to be the high-profile promoters of a Bush-Gore debate on, say, the future of American television?
Fess up, you’d be inclined to check out at least a few minutes, right?
Well, those rhetorical tussles have as much chance of happening as the ones proposed by two different men, moneybags New York financier Forstmann and Freeport, Ill., Mayor Gitz.
The Republican Forstmann has a passion for improving schools; his Children’s Scholarship Fund provided $160 million for 40,000 needy kids and their parents last year.
Gitz is the non-partisan mayor of Freeport (population: 30,000), which is 100 miles northwest of Chicago and boasts a big Goodyear Tire plant and the corporate offices of a Fortune 500 firm, Newell-Rubbermaid, while recently bemoaning floods on the Pecatonica River.
Forstmann is proposing a 90-minute faceoff on the state of American education.
It’s a reflection of the times in that he’s trying to essentially buy his way into the political process, offering to donate a total of $1 million to children’s charities of the candidates’ choice if they hold the debate.
Gitz has taken an idea of Freeport attorney Frank Cook and turned back the clock for raucous inspiration.
In 1858 Freeport was the site of one of the seven famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. They were, by today’s carefully managed counterparts, a complete free-for-all.
There was no august moderator or panel of mainstream journalists to make inquiries, the latter usually so fixed upon their well-crafted gotcha! inquisitions that they pay scant attention to natural follow-ups to an answer inspired by a fellow panelist’s question.
There were no stifling rules on length of response and rebuttal, which presumably resulted from many hours of meetings between dueling aides to the candidates.
No, it was just two guys truly debating for hours and interrogating one another.
No moderator, just a timekeeper.
At Freeport, Lincoln started by addressing the crowd for an hour–an hour!–during which he focused on matters broached by Douglas during their first debate.
He asked Douglas if a territory could lawfully ban slavery prior to adopting a state constitution.
Outdoors before 15,000 people, Douglas responded to that ultimately critical query during his opening, 90-minute address.
He said that it could be done, a declaration that infuriated the Southern wing of his own Democratic Party and helped explain why it split the party two years later and became a factor in Lincoln’s victory.
Lincoln then had a half-hour to respond.
It’s the way that Freeport would like to see Gore and Bush go after one another this year.
“We are aware of all the modern trappings of presidential debates–the large halls, the thousands of press, security and support personnel–the carefully couched format and questions and answer structure,” Gitz writes in his formal invitation to both candidates.
Why not include a small city that’s not just a grand footnote in history but a lively crossroad between cities in Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa?
In an age when, say, old-time ballparks are all the rage, why not an old-time debate?
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“It would be a refreshing departure,” the mayor said last week.
Gore, surely the more effective debater, has signaled a willingness to engage in both proposals.
Bush, however, has demurred.
“The less they expose him to harm, the better off they are,” said a Republican political strategist. “That was the mindset they took into the Republican primary debates.”
Some commentators, such as Kate O’Beirne of National Review, find the Forstmann plan to be perfectly suited for Bush.
After all, he boasts all the time about his education record in Texas, while Gore stumbled a tad on the matter of his kids going to private school while poor children are stuck in awful public schools.
Dan Schnur, a longtime GOP strategist now advising Forstmann, concedes that the businessman knows the odds are long. “He asked about the financial incentive and that may shorten the odds,” Schnur said.
The Forstmann and Freeport invitations may also beg the question of the utility of debates, notably how much they really inform about the leadership potential, as opposed to the performance skills, of a candidate.
After all, if debating was our prime criterion for selecting a president, the Republican candidate might well be goofy Alan Keyes.
At this point, conventional wisdom among the political class might be that debates could take especially great importance this year, particularly with a public largely inattentive to politics and surprisingly ignorant about the two prime contenders, according to surveys.
It is also true that when it comes time to get serious about debates after the party conventions, the seeming front-runner will have the leverage.
In an era when caution rules most campaigns, he will be reticent to debate very often or in a format that leaves much to chance.
After Labor Day, a candidate who is trailing will be gung-ho for any high-profile match against the leader.
Of course, the concept of dramatic change, especially with famous sponsors backing single-issue confrontations, has its inevitable allure, at least to political wags.
Donald Trump could subsidize a debate on affordable housing, with $2 million going to his favorite charity in West Palm Beach, Fla.
ABC News could haul out Leonardo DiCaprio and the Budweiser frogs to sponsor a debate on global warming. Gore would be the clear favorite in that one.
And, I can confirm exclusively, ABC Sports might even be willing to enter such a fray.
It could sponsor a debate on the topic convulsing television sports columnists, namely the winner of ABC’s generally secret bake-off to join announcer Al Michaels as co-host of “Monday Night Football,” a job for which Rush Limbaugh has already auditioned.
Tongue in cheek, former Tribune sports columnist David Israel, a consulting producer for ABC’s “Monday Night Football,” says he will match $50 from ABC with a $50 charitable contribution of his own, as will his boss, Don Ohlmeyer.
But ABC Sports ultimately doesn’t need such an endeavor. It’s getting tons of publicity already.
That can’t be said for proud Freeport, prospective home of a three-hour Gore-Bush debate.
“We are encouraging the vice president to be serious about this,” said Cook, the attorney who inspired the effort.
In a distinctly plaintive tone, he then asked me, “Do you by any chance know the next time he’s coming to Illinois?”