Summary: While we watch the debates and judge the candidates’ style, we tend to miss the serious content. Like Romney’s contempt for us, seen in his serial lies. That’s a long tradition in America, going back to Reagan’s first debate in the 1984 election. We not only ignored his signs of early Alzheimer’s, but elected him. What a sad fate put America into our hands! We can do better, but only if we try.
The presidential debates are among the most closely observed and discussed events of our year-long campaign season. Only collective blindness — we prefer not to see — allows us not to see disturbing facts. Such as Bob Dole, only marginally functional in the 1996 presidential campaign. But the extreme example is the 1984 election, where we did not notice the obvious.
“Ronald Reagan had Alzheimer’s while president, says son”
in The Guardian, 17 January 2011 — Excerpt.
“In it, Ron Reagan describes his growing sense of alarm over his father’s mental condition, beginning as early as three years into his first term. He recalls the presidential debate with Walter Mondale on 7 October 1984. My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses, fumbling with his notes, uncharacteristically lost for words. He looked tired and bewildered…”
The Politics Blog at Esquire by Charles Pierce, 4 October 2012 — Excerpt.
“{T}he first debate in 1984 between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale … took place in Louisville, Kentucky, and, believe me when I say this, the incumbent president of the United States stood on the stage exposed that night as a symptomatic Alzheimer’s patient.
“This was not something I took lightly. The disease was in the process of swallowing my father at the time, as it eventually would his four other siblings. At that point, even at the rough beginning of my encounter with the disease, I knew it when I saw it, and I saw it that night. Had the moderator of that debate asked, “Mr. President, can you tell us what city you are in right now?”, the odds were maybe no better than 2-1 that Reagan would have been able to come up with the answer.
“Years later, in the course of researching a book, after Reagan’s Alzheimer’s had become public knowledge, I had occasion to ask a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher when he first thought Reagan had become symptomatic. “That first debate,” the doctor told me, “It scared the hell out of me for his entire second term.”
“Of course, this was not something anyone at the time was impolite to mention. The notion that the president was at best addled and, at worst, deteriorating before our eyes, was something that needed to be dispelled as quickly as possible lest the American People, those delicate children, be made wakeful in the night. So, in the second debate, Reagan was able to get through an entire wisecrack without stumbling into incoherence, and everybody pretended the first debate never happened, and the country, somehow, got through a second term with a president who was losing his grip on his faculties.
“I also feel constrained to point out that I saw this debate mentioned not once in the various reviews of catastrophic debate performances that the news outlets ran during the run-up to the debate on Wednesday. It is lost to history, it appears.”
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For more about this see “When Did Reagan’s First Signs of Alzheimer’s Appear?” by Christopher Lane in Psychology Today, 21 January 2011.
See for yourself: the Reagan vs. Mondale debate, 7 October 1984
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