Early debates offer risks and revelations

Revealing a vulnerability
Sometimes a leading candidate’s vulnerability is revealed in a debate among contenders of his own party.

Once he has won his party’s nomination, the opposing side uses that vulnerability in the fall campaign.

The most telling example of this came in 1988.

On April 13 of that year, a week before the New York primary, Democratic contender then-Sen. Al Gore, was trailing front-runner Massachusetts Gov. Mike Dukakis in the delegate tally.

Gore squared off with Dukakis and Jesse Jackson in a debate. It was clear Dukakis would almost certainly win the nomination. Gore had, at best, a chance to use the debate to jar the front-runner into making a costly error.

Gore decided to raise the issue of a Massachusetts program that Dukakis had presided over which allowed convicted violent felons, even those serving life sentences without parole, to get weekend furloughs from prison.

Gore's fateful furlough question
Saying that several prisoners fled while on furlough and two committed murders, Gore asked Dukakis wryly, "Would you advocate a similar program for federal penitentiaries?"

Dukakis, who’d built his campaign on his reputation for being a competent executive, reacted with annoyance: “Al, the difference between you and me is I have to run a criminal justice system. You never have.”

“Could we get an answer?” Gore asked.

Dukakis replied that Gore already knew that "we've changed our policy. There will not be a furlough for lifers."

But Gore wouldn’t relent — repeatedly needling Dukakis, trying to get him to answer his original question.

There’s no evidence the skirmish had an effect on the outcome: Gore finished a poor third in the New York primary, as Dukakis won it, and went on to clinch the nomination.

But Republicans were keenly watching that New York debate.

'Fell into our lap'
Jim Pinkerton, research director for the GOP presidential candidate Vice President George Bush, told the Washington Post a few months later, “That's the first time I paid attention. I thought to myself, `This is incredible' ... It totally fell into our lap.”

In the fall, both the Bush campaign and a group called the National Security Political Action Committee ran ads on the Massachusetts furloughs, with latter focusing on convicted murderer Willie Horton who’d raped a woman while on furlough.

“I never mentioned Willie Horton,” Gore said four years later, explaining his role in that April debate. “I didn’t know his name, much less what his race was. I raised the issue of crime.”

He blamed the Republicans for focusing on Horton, a black man, and making “a blatantly racist appeal.”

The lesson remains: Watch the early debates as an opposition researcher would. You may find a valuable nugget hiding in plain sight.

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