In My Time - Dick Cheney [146]
After the convention I knew that my performance at one event in particular, the vice presidential debate, would likely matter more than all the other campaigning I did. The debate was scheduled for October 5, 2000, in Danville, Kentucky. I had spent some time during the Democratic convention that summer watching tapes of Lieberman’s debates against Lowell Weicker, the liberal three-term incumbent Republican senator whom Joe had upset in 1988, in no small part because of his superior performance in their televised debates.
Presidential and vice presidential debates are events like no other. First of all, the stakes are unbelievably high, and a single gaffe can derail a candidacy. A mistake can cost an election. And although being able to answer the questions competently is crucial, it isn’t nearly enough. A candidate has to have a sense of the most important messages he or she wants to leave with voters and the presence of mind to return to those messages again and again—and then again. It also helps a lot if you can come up with some memorable one-liners. After all is said and done, after all the studying and planning and strategizing, it is likely to be the one-liners that stay with people and determine who wins and who loses a debate. Knowing that I had my work cut out for me, I asked Liz to organize a process for formal debate preparation.
Governor Bush had already participated in numerous debates during the primary campaign, so work had been under way for many months preparing briefing materials and possible questions and answers for him. Gary Edson, who would later become deputy national security and economic advisor to the president, had been in charge of the Bush briefing materials. He came out on the road with us right after the convention, bringing about fifty pounds of briefing books with him. We went through them, and Liz began to prepare briefing books for me, adapting the governor’s format and background materials. We also added questions that I was likely to get, about Halliburton, for example, that the governor might not. Gus Puryear, a Nashville lawyer who’d worked with my son-in-law, Phil Perry, on Senate campaign finance hearings, came on board to help with the research and drafting.
I studied the briefing books between campaign stops, and then in early September started having practice sessions with either Phil or Stuart Stevens, a communications consultant with the campaign, playing the role of moderator. They would pepper me with questions, and my job was to hit all the main points we wanted to get across on each key issue within the allotted time for each answer. When I got pretty comfortable with this format, I asked Rob Portman, then a congressman from Ohio, to join our sessions. He played Joe Lieberman, and did a tremendous job. He had spent countless hours listening to tapes of Lieberman’s speeches and knew not only the substance of the responses the senator was likely to give, but even the way he was likely to deliver them.
I invited several people I trusted—including Steve Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz, Dave Gribbin, and Scooter Libby—to watch these sessions and give me feedback. At first we stopped after every answer for comments, but this turned out to be pretty frustrating. Everyone had an opinion about how the question should be answered, and I didn’t find it particularly helpful to watch my advisors debate each other over the answer I had just given. And I worried we were in danger of missing the big picture—the overall impact of what I was saying. So after a few sessions, I asked everyone to hold their comments to the end.
In late September we moved the debate prep out to Wyoming and instituted a pretty rigorous schedule. Each morning we’d spend three hours going over questions on a particular subject. Each night, at precisely the time the debate would be taking place in Kentucky, we would hold a mock debate. We filmed these prep sessions, and when each session was done,