No doubt scores of other images would more accurately encapsulate the presidential campaigns. What makes these relatively trivial moments momentous is that we have experienced them together. Producer Ed Fouhy likened the 1992 debates to a miniseries, "where in order to participate in the public dialogue in the office, the shop, the school, the workplace the next day, you had to have seen what was on the air the night before." With cable and VCRs siphoning off much of the network news audience, as Congressman Markey noted, such common experiences are increasingly rare.
By giving us a nearly universal political experience, debates have thus become a vehicle for our public deliberation. We should try to safeguard and strengthen them, for we need all the public deliberation we can muster.
But we shouldn't lose sight of how far we've come. According to the conventional wisdom of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the 1960 debates were a one-time fluke. Debating had cost Nixon the election, it was thought; no other front-runner would ever make the same mistake. Candidates "may be killing the genre," Robert MacNeil of the BBC (now of PBS) observed. Former CBS News president Sig Mickelson thought it "conceivable" that presidential aspirants might someday debate, but he wasn't optimistic.
Confounding expectations, candidates did debate in 1976 and in every election since. Now the innovation has begun to harden into a tradition. In 1996 and thereafter, a candidate who blocks debates -- or a candidate whom the public perceives to be blocking debates -- will pay a considerable price.
Debates today are entrenched more deeply than ever before, perhaps more deeply than we had any right to expect. In an era when our political system seems to change only by degenerating, this new tradition gives us a measure of hope.