Washington, Sept 26: Former president George Bush has called them "crap." Ex-president Jimmy Carter said they were "one of the most difficult challenges" of his life. President Bill Clinton says they're important, but "don't really show" how good a leader a candidate will make.In their 40-year history, televised US presidential debates have won decidedly mixed reviews from their participants and from political experts who welcome their contribution to informing a frequently listless voting public, but caution that only very rarely do they decide the overall contest. "I don't really have a high regard for debates . but I do think that they are absolutely essential in a nation as disinterested in politics as we are," explains Stephen Hess, a presidential politics specialist at the Brookings Institution.Next Tuesday, after months of clashing via spokespeople, written statements and sound-bites, Republican George W Bush and Democrat Al Gore will stand side by side and join that tradition, hoping to break open their statistically deadlocked race. If history is any guide, the overwhelming majority of viewers will merely "reinforce the choice they've already made," according to Eric Davis, a political scientist at Middlebury College in Vermont.That leaves Bush and Gore scrambling for the few "truly undecideds" who could swing the November elections, said Davis, and hoping to avoid being responsible for a memorable gaffe or the victim of a biting one-liner. Bush's father, the ex-president, is remembered for the 1992 debate in which he impatiently looked at his watch.His 1988 rival, Democrat Michael Dukakis, made a poor impression when he gave an emotionless response to whether he would change his anti-death penalty stance if someone raped and killed his wife. Bush told US public television (PBS) in an April 1999 interview that he remembered his debate experience as "ugly. I don't like 'em." "Maybe that's why I was looking at it (his watch), `only 10 more minutes of this crap." And asked whether debates should be a required part of the campaign, he replied: "Nope . I think you ought to do what's best to get you elected. And if that's best that you have no debates, too bad for all you debate-lovers."In 1996, Clinton, Bush's 1992 foe, made a splash when he took a shot at his rival - Republican Senator Bob Dole, then 73 - saying "I don't think Senator Dole is too old to be President. It's the age of his ideas that I question." "They don't really show, you know, whether you're a good decision maker, although they show whether you can understand a situation in a hurry and respond to it," Clinton told PBS in an interview in August 2000.But "there is some substance; there is some meat there" because they give voters a better sense of the person running for office, he said. In 1980, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan scored with a offhand line, "there you go again, Mr President," referring to incumbent Jimmy Carter's health care platform.Of his own 1976 face-off with an incumbent President, Gerald Ford, Carter told PBS in a 1989 interview that sharing the stage as his equal was "it was one of the most difficult challenges that I had ever faced in my life." Carter, who defeated Ford by a razor-thin margin, also recalled the 27-minute audio failure during one of their debates, during which the two men "stood there almost like robots," afraid to make a wrong move.The 1976 debates came 16 years after the very first televised US presidential debates, which pitted Richard Nixon against John F Kennedy, whom analysts say understood the relatively new medium better. Nixon looked awful: He had erred in not using makeup, was sweating profusely, and his clothes did not fit properly because he had been ill.
