OCTOBER:
THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES
Even without me, the debates were a thorn in the side of the other candidates. They'd never admit it, but all the hemming and hawing about venue, format, and questions could be traced back to fear. Not fear of speaking to an audience of tens of millions of people, but trepidation about how much was at stake. One misstep, one wishy-washy answer and you were mercilessly crucified by the pundits seconds after the debate ended.
I tried to negotiate for tougher questions, even suggesting that consumer advocates and regular citizens sit on the panel. No go. The powers that be didn't want any surprises.
The Peace Party team spent a lot of time debating among ourselves. Should we use some of the theatrics that had gained us notoriety several months back? Should we be on the offensive from the get-go or should we present our own proposals without talking about the other candidates' weaknesses?
We eventually decided the situation demanded a polite, serious demeanor and vetoed the pith helmet. (It's a jungle out there.) I was also grateful when the doctor okayed me to lose the crutches.
Peter stopped me on my way to the auditorium. “You're kidding, right? You're not wearing that.”
I looked down at my MEAN PEOPLE SUCK T-shirt. “If I get a suit, a tie, and dress shoes, I'll be at more than seventy-five possessions. I don't want to go through that again.”
“You can trade in a few CDs and books,” he said. “You can donate the suit to charity tomorrow. But you are not wearing a T-shirt to a presidential debate.”
“It's my good luck shirt. I've had it for years.”
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A glimpse of the old Peter emerged. “Josh Swensen, go back to your room right now and change.”
“What am I, five?”
He blocked my path to the hall. I'm sure any student in Psych 101 would say this power struggle was our way of dealing with the monumental stress of the occasion, and they'd probably be right. I stubbornly bulldozed past my stepfather to the hall beyond.
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After weeks of negotiating, it had been decided that the first debate would be held at the University of Wisconsin. As I entered the auditorium, I was shocked by the rows of empty seats.
“I thought we agreed to have an audienceâ”
“Last-minute change,” the producer said. “We're doing a tape delay too.”
“What? This was supposed to be live!”
She told me to get over it.
It didn't take long to realize what Peter told me later, that so many of the people who had originally gotten tickets were students, and neither of the other candidates wanted a youthful crowd. Instead, I found myself face-to-face with several unsmiling middle-aged panelists.
I had never met either candidate before; I wiped my hands against my T-shirt to get rid of the sweat. Both men were friendly, even if they did seem amused at having to deal with someone my age.
“I'm just kind of wondering why we're having this in an auditorium if there aren't any
people
here,” I said.
“âJust kind of wondering'?” the president asked.
I tried not to let them throw me off track. I went for some levity. “I mean, if you two were afraid of having actual people, we could've just used a television studio.”
They both laughed, and the producer told us to take our places on the stage. So much for bowling them over with my personality.
When the moderator asked the first question, my knees almost buckled.
They had changed the questions.
I did my best to keep up, but the topics were so vague I never would have agreed to them. It took all my willpower to focus.
Listening to the other candidates speak to the watered-down issues, I didn't know how anyone could distinguish one from the other. Their platitudes and generalities were completely interchangeable. The whole exercise reminded me of the teacher's voice in a Charlie Brown cartoonâ
waah, waah
,
waah
âan insufferable drone.
When it was my turn, the moderator turned to me. “Mr. Swensen, you have three minutes to rebut the president.”
I spent the first few seconds of my allotted time staring at the empty auditorium seats. They seemed an apt metaphor for both candidates' lifeless campaigns. This whole thing had been rigged; everyone was in on the joke but me. How could I possibly change a system so deeply rooted and self-serving?
Then the two candidates winked at each other.
My original plan had been to only talk about Peace Party initiatives. But those condescending winks kicked me into attack mode pretty quickly.
Mr. President, let's talk about your administration's report card. As of today, the stock market has lost $4.8 trillion since your inauguration. There's been a 43 percent jump in unemployment. Forty-three percent of the tax cut you pushed through went to the country's wealthiest 1 percent. Oh, and let's not forget invading another country without provocation or the blessing of the U.N. Didn't you run on a platform of a “humble foreign policy”? Your reasons for invading Iraq were to find weapons of mass destruction. As of now, we haven't found a one. You followed that up
by awarding more than $1.7 billion of government contracts to Vice President Cheney's old company, Halliburton. I guess if someone had to manage the Iraqi oilfields, it might as well be your friends.
You say your Homeland Security Act is the answer to keeping our country safe. But did you tell us what was in the fine print? Corporate loopholes and handouts, not to mention that high schools had to hand over the names and phone numbers of every student to the military. Schools that refused because they valued their students' privacy would lose valuable federal funding. How does cutting school budgets help to fight terrorism?
And how about the Information Awareness Officeâdidn't you read any George Orwell when you were my age? What you've created is scarier than anything in his fiction. Every credit card purchase, phone call, magazine subscription, e-mail, video rental, and bank deposit can go into a centralized Pentagon database. Since when is the ordinary citizen the enemy?
Am I the only one who thinks the foxes are guarding the henhouse here? We've got two oilmen in the White Houseâis that a fair representation of the average American? Are you looking out for us or for your bigwig friends?
The laws you put into place during your Administration will affect us for years. When the Iroquois used to make decisions, they asked themselves how the result would affect the next seven generations. Has anyone been thinking that far ahead?
Under your helm, our country has seen unprecedented budget deficits, economic downfalls, as well as war, yet you've taken 166 vacation days at your Texas ranch while the average American gets 16 days off a year. People have said I haven't taken the job of president seriously enoughâhave you?
The silence was deafening.
President Bush flexed his hands repeatedly by his sides. His buddies who owned the large media corporations had been keeping a lid on many of these stories in exchange for lenient FCC regulations, but he knew everything I said was true. If the auditorium had been full of students, the place would have jumped to its feet. Instead, a group of horrified Brooks Brothers panelists shook their heads in dismay.
The moderator told the president he had a thirty-second rebuttal. President Bush didn't denounce anything I said, just looked me dead in the eye.
“Son, I want to know why you live in this country if it's so bad.”
I knew I wasn't supposed to answer his rebuttal, but leaned forward anyway. “Why would I leave, when I can work toward fixing something I believe in? Isn't that what you adults always say kids should be doing?”
When the moderator objected to my breach of protocol, the president waved him off as if I could never say anything of any consequence. It was at that point that I realized the president had a strand of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of his left
shoe. I wondered if his Secret Service agents had missed it or if they were letting him walk around like that on purpose. Either way, it was beautiful.
For the next question, it was the Democrats' turn to peddle their wares. The candidate talked about how revitalized the Democratic Party was, how it represented the “average American.” When it was my turn, I didn't waste a second of my three minutes.
I'm so glad to hear you say the Democratic Party is back in business. This certainly is news to me as well as to millions of other Americans. But when you look at the facts, your record is just as bad as the current Administration's.
The environment? When Bill Clinton was president, he never introduced the Kyoto Protocol into the Senate for ratification.
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He didn't sign the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. He didn't force Detroit to improve cars' fuel efficiency.
Campaign finance reform? President Clinton took as much money in corporate kickbacks as the Republicans did; in fact, he expanded the soft money loophole! And if you look at the voting record of the Democrats in the House, most of them have been voting along with the Republicans on major issues right down the line. We don't have a two-party system! We have one partyâthe Suck Up to Big Business Party. Where does the “average
person” fit in? As someone sitting by on the sidelines while politicians loot the land?
If the Democrats were really revitalized, why didn't they insist the trillion-dollar national surplus be spent on health care for the forty-four million Americans who don't have
it
instead of refunds to the wealthiest 1 percent? The minimum wage hasn't been raised since 1997, but you sat on the sidelines while this Administration handed out billions of dollars in corporate rebates. Why did you let them? Why didn't you refuse to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on starting a war a world away and instead focus our money and energies here? Why are you letting this Administration commit billions of dollars to a missile shield system that even they acknowledge doesn't work?
No wonder you people are so threatened by the
Peace Party. We're what the Democratic Party used to beâidealistic and energized. Listening to all the people at our rallies just makes you realize how much you sold out!
I'm sorry, but have you guys forgotten who elected you? As I've said throughout my campaign all alongâyou work for us, remember?
I was
pumped.
The producer yelled “cut” at the end of the debate, and I approached both candidates to shake their hands. But they turned their backs on me and quickly left the stage.
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Peter met me backstage and gave me a big hug. “You knocked it out of the park, Josh. I can't wait to hear the pundits on this one.”
We hurried back to our rooms at the hostel to watch the debate on tape delay. When
Will and Grace
came on instead of the scheduled debate, Peter called the producer's cell phone. I could hear him screaming from the next room.
Then Peter plopped down on the bottom bunk, took off his baseball cap, and rubbed his head.
“Technical difficulties. They say the entire tape is scratched.”
“That's crap,” Beth said. “They don't want the voters to hear Josh exposing the other candidates for who they are.”
“We haven't gained an inch,” I added. “Even with the amendment, they're disenfranchising us the same way they disenfranchise every other American.”
“Of course, there are technical difficulties sometimes,” Peter said. “I had several close calls shooting commercials in my past life.”
Beth nailed her can of soda into the trash so hard the wastebasket fell over. “I can't believe you're sticking up for them!”
Peter reached into the pocket of his jacket. “I'm not defending them. I'm just saying I always had a backup plan.” He popped out the CD from his recorder.
“No,” I stammered. “Not the whole debate?”
“I had to shoot it from backstage and hide it when Security came by, so the quality's not too good. But I got all of it.”
I grabbed my laptop and hooked it up to the recorder. Peter was right; the image quality was just okay, but the audio was clear as a bell. I downloaded the debate onto the Larry Web site. Lisa called the press to alert them to the bootleg. Within the hour, every major network had interrupted their programming to broadcast the debate. A reporter for CNN interviewed the show's producer to comment on the so-called technical difficulties; the poor woman looked like she needed a straitjacket, she was flailing around with so much anger.