Debates recall past zingers

The presidential debate season is upon us again. No doubt these TV beauty contests will get the highest viewership ever. For one thing, there is no incumbent campaigning. Further, the race is tight as a tick. And finally, spicing up the saga are two virtual unknowns--a minority and a woman.

The pundits will be pondering until election night the portent of these debates. Very little, I’d guess. Thinking back on earlier ones, I can’t remember any that made much difference in the final outcome.

But some were memorable. Correction: The debates themselves weren’t, being too long and windy. Only a few zingers were notable. Here are ones I enjoyed the most.

In 1960 it was Kennedy versus Nixon. Stiff and formal. But Nixon suffered in their first encounter. Not in what he said, but he looked tired, sweaty and unshaven (a shadowy portent of Watergate much later?), while Kennedy looked fresh and sassy. In the election, what was crucial was the Illinois electoral votes for Kennedy, swung by Chicago’s infamous political stuffing of the ballot boxes.

In 1976 it was Carter versus Ford. President Ford’s huge gaffe was in claiming that Poland was independent of Soviet communism. It filled headlines and commentary for the rest of the fall.
In 1980 it was Carter versus Reagan. Challenger Reagan firs t intoned that now-standard dig at the incumbents: “...it might be well if you would ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?“

Reagan got off another good one from the same debates: “We don’t have inflation because the people are living too well. We have inflation because the government is living too well.”

In 1984, going for his second term, Reagan pulled a beauty in his debate with challenger Walter Mondale. Reagan’s age had been deemed a minus (much like McCain’s is today). So at one pivot point, Reagan reassured the audience, “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

In the 2000 debates, my funniest remembrance wasn’t anything Bush or Gore said. Rather, it was during a town hall arrangement where they both stood and moved about freely in a ring surrounded by the audience in bleachers. At one point, Gore was obviously crowding up next to Bush while Bush was trying to answer a question. In reaction, Bush did a smiling double-take in classic vaudeville mode. It made Gore’s maneuver laughable.

In Bush versus Kerry in 2004, Kerry got off a good one: “Being lectured by the President on fiscal responsibility is a little bit like Tony Soprano talking to me about law and order in this country.”

The most famous put-down, though, occurred in a vice-presid ential debate in 1988 between young senator Dan Quayle (GOP) and the veteran Democrat senator Lloyd Bentsen. Quayle claimed, “I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency...”

Bentsen’s stern response: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.” It brought the house down. Nevertheless, the first President Bush and his veep Quayle won going away against Dukakis and Bentsen.

I was hoping Quayle’s response would have been, “And neither is your running mate.” Rather, he whined about the cheap shot he thought Bentsen made.

As for today’s mud slinging, which may be typically absent in the official debates, it’s flourishing like never before on the flaming Internet.

Here’s a sample. The first charge is that Obama isn’t legally qualified to be President. The second is that McCain isn’t.

Anti-Obama: A Democrat and former party official filed suit, claiming that Obama is not a natural born U.S. citizen or that, if he ever was, he lost his citizenship when he was adopted in Indonesia. He also cited "dual loyalties" due to Obama’s citizenship and ties with Kenya and Indonesia Further there is the issue with his birth certificate from Hawaii, “verified as a forgery by three independent document forensi c experts.”

Anti-McCain: Another charge, from the Left: “By parentage he is a citizen, aided by the fact he was born outside the U.S. because of a military stationing of his parents. But...he was NOT born in the United States. The Constitution’s founders added the term ‘naturally born‘ intentionally to insure that presidents were, in fact, born here. [But] if you are inside a U.S. embassy or consulate, you are on ‘U.S. land.’ That does not describe the conditions of his birth...”

Obviously, neither charge against the candidates had merit. If the charge against Obama had been valid, as my columnist friend Dave Kerr noted recently, wouldn’t Hillary Clinton’s lawyers have howled to the heavens?

Their silence spoke volumes.

A final note: Both Democrat candidates are lawyers, unlike either of the GOP candidates. Enough said.

Recalling? Those good old days

There’s this problem, you see. I can no longer remember many words I want to say while talking with other people, so I went to a doctor. He reassured me that for an otherwise healthy guy halfway through his seventies, my problem was cause for no alarm. He called it MCI--minor cognitive impairment--but offered no remedy. It’s just the aging process.

I got home, checked my computer, and saw this on the Internet:

“God grant me...The senility to forget the people I never liked;The good fortune to run into the ones I do, And the eyesight to tell the difference.”

That’s small comfort, as I can still plainly see friends patiently filling in the blanks for me in conversations. Luckily my problem in speaking hasn’t spilled over into my other faculties. Yet. If in my writing it does, I hope some editor will make sure you never notice it or else show me the door.

Moreover, I’m beyond worrying about temptation. “As you grow older,” Winston Churchill once noted, “it will avoid you.”

In any event, my musings in print have become increasingly reflective of my aging mindset in recent years, especi ally regarding the good old days. I suppose that also is normal, for people of my generation tend to express dismay over how fast things are changing nowadays, even when for the better.

The Internet is full of testimonials to how things used to be and how we were brought up to be much better citizens than what the younger generations are producing. Or so it seems.
They don’t have broadly shared experiences like we did, from the military draft, from widespread suffering and sacrifice occasioned by World War II, and by the thrill of eventual, unconditional victory. There were comparatively few of us to begin with, reflecting Depression impacts, and our ranks now are thinning rapidly.

No wonder we’re so grouchy: Unpopular wars, antiwar sentiments, unsatisfactory outcomes. Thank goodness we are finally succeeding, winning big in Iraq.

So it’s no surprise, while snorting over the sad state of entertainment today, that we still praise “Meet me in St. Louis,” Jimmy Stewart, Tommy Dorsey, Ike...I could go on and on. In our house, it’s also why we often prefer the old movies on TCM rather than much of today’s cable fare with its trashy dialogue and gore.

But what the heck. We may as well sit back and enjoy the rest of the journey. The Olympics were interesting. (But questions arose: How did those beach volleyball players keep the sand out of their cracks ?) Most of us seniors here in Stafford live pretty well and have the time to muse about such trivialities and play with the grandkids.

And as we have told the youngsters many times, they have it easy compared with when we were young. (Who ever heard of beach volleyball?)

One memorable event in my young life took a long time for me to appreciate its huge significance. When I was about 10 or 12, summer was starting out to be long and typically hot in my home in west Texas. We did have a few electric fans to create a breeze, and at church they passed out hand-fans to all the worshippers, and they helped a little.

Then my dad brought home a big boxed fan, one he installed in a window. This new-fangled thing had excelsior stuffed around it, and an automatic water line attached, to drip water down through the excelsior. He turned it on.

Magic! It was ding-nigh indescribable. It felt like standing in front of an opened refrigerator. I would just stand there until I got chilly. It worked great, thanks to our area’s prevalent low humidity. This first, cheap evaporative air cooler was an instant hit. I remember singing into the fan and hearing my voice sound all buzzy. Great fun.

Who could have known that advancing air conditioning and refrigeration technology would so rapidly bring great prosperity to the South, and turn Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and Phoenix into boom towns that now far20outpace the older northern cities. Nowadays, why get excited over global warming when our homes are quite comfortable all summer?

But I digress. There are hundreds of fond memories I can still, yes, recall, such as--
* Keys--Skeleton, skate and church.
* Tires--although properly inflated, they’d blow out.
* Big 78 rpm records you could play backwards and get weird sounds, like much of today’s kinky music.
* Floor dimmer switch--you kept stomping your left foot until the stupid oncoming car dimmed his brights.
* Health--I grew up with lead-based paints, measles, bikes without helmets, .22 rifles and shotguns--and I was going to mention something else, too.

But enough. Finally, perhaps we fogies always appear grouchy because, as another Internet wit noted, “I was always taught to respect my elders, but it keeps getting harder to find one.”