Presidential Debates in Russia

Allan J. Lichtman

Like E. H. Carr, I believe that history is as much about the future as about the past. This belief has guided my rather unorthodox forty-year career as a historian and led me to become an unofficial stand-in for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in mock presidential debates this past September in Russia. I took part in twelve such debates, sponsored by the United States Department of State, during a hectic ten-day period in four Russian cities—Moscow, Ryazan, St. Petersburg, and Yekaterinburg. My route to representing Obama in these debates was as unconventional as my destination.

I turned to history my senior year in college after nearly completing a biology major. My background in science and mathematics paved the way for a career as history professor, with a specialty in the quantitative political history of the United States. In the 1980s, I began applying this expertise to the public realm by serving as an expert witness in voting rights and redistricting litigation. I have testified in more than seventy-five cases, including the Texas congressional redistricting case that was ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007.

In 1981, I collaborated with Vladimir Keilis-Borok, an authority on mathematical prediction, to develop the Keys to the White House, a historically-based system for predicting and explaining the results of American presidential elections. The historical theory behind the Keys is that presidential elections are primarily referenda on the performance of the party holding the White House. The Keys system has correctly forecast the popular-vote results of all seven elections since 1984 and has alerted professional forecasters to the importance of integrating historical judgments into their predictive models. The Keys led to media exposure, a role in which I could bring historical perspective to illuminate the discussion of contemporary events.

This work as a public historian opened up the opportunity to participate in the State Department’s mock debate program in Russia. The official purpose of the program was not only to heighten awareness of the U.S. elections—and to use the debates as a way of informing Russian audiences of policy issues—but also to act as a teaching opportunity on the nuts and bolts of hosting such a forum. In other words, here was a chance to show the Russians firsthand how American democracy worked—a noble, if somewhat presumptuous goal.

My worthy adversary in the mock debates was not another historian. Rather Ann Stone, the debater who unofficially represented John McCain, is a political operative. She is founder and president of Republicans for Choice, which advocates abortion rights for women, but otherwise is rooted in the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

Most of the debates took place at university campuses. We also performed at a conference of English language teachers at Ryazan, at the American Center in Moscow, and at my favorite stop, a Jewish high school in Moscow. The high school pupils were just as acute, knowledgeable, and analytical in their questions as the university students.          

In all venues our audiences, which ranged in size from about fifty to two hundred, demonstrated a remarkably informed grasp of the dynamics of American politics, the issues in dispute between Obama and McCain, and the importance of the 2008 election for the U.S. and the world. This experience sustained the impression I had gathered on earlier visits to Russia in the 1980s: that the Russian people know far more about the United States than the American people know about Russia.

Not surprisingly, some of the questions reflected Russian preoccupations. We were asked whether our candidates would recognize, within the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, the de facto independent republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia that are backed by the Russian Federation. We were asked about our candidates’ positions on the Bush administration’s plan to deploy missile defense interceptors in Poland. Participants wanted to know our candidates’ opinions on Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and were interested in hearing their ideas on improving relations between the United States and Russia. One student even asked for Obama’s and McCain’s views on drilling for oil in environmentally sensitive regions of Siberia.

The questions asked by our audiences, however, demonstrated a much broader interest in election issues, including American foreign and domestic policy. Many of these questions had a bit of an anti-American edge. Audience members asked whether a racist country like the United States was ready to elect a black president and whether either candidate would be able to control the corrupting influence of wealthy corporate interests in Washington. They also demanded solutions from Obama and McCain for ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More conventionally, they wanted to know how our candidates would improve the American health care and educational systems, and deal with the economic crisis that was beginning to afflict both the United States and Russia at the time of our debates. They probed each candidate’s position on international trade, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and on worldwide efforts to cope with the problem of man-made global warming. They asked about McCain’s age and Obama’s experience and the qualifications of Sarah Palin and Joe Biden as vice presidential candidates.       

From my perspective, I viewed the debates in part as an exercise in applied history. My presentation focused on the historic import of the 2008 election, which offered an opportunity to end the conservative era of American history that had begun with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and begin a new era of liberal policies at home and a more cooperative, multilateral approach to relations abroad.

I presented a historical analysis of the American experience since 2001 that indicted the Bush administration for internal corruption, misguided adventures abroad, favoritism to the rich, and a neglect of such urgent priorities as health care, economic regulation, environmental protection, and global warming. I dissected John McCain’s voting record during the Bush years to demonstrate that he usually was among the top ten to fifteen senators in his support of the administration. My debate style also reflected a historian’s approach to evidence. Whenever possible I cited sources for factual claims and quoted directly from media reports and policy studies. In contrast to the usual supposition that debates are shallow and error-prone, I found that testing my ideas in this intense context strengthened my understanding of recent American history.

Given that our futures were not at stake, Ann and I could be more freewheeling than Obama and McCain in the real debates. Ann aggressively attacked Obama for what she claimed were “zero accomplishments” in his career, adroitly brandishing a blank page of white paper to illustrate her point. She claimed that the election of such a cipher to the presidency would pose grave risks for the United States and the world. She also claimed that Obama was a phony statesman who took credit for the accomplishments of others.

With equal zeal, I indicted McCain for taking a dangerously aggressive and militaristic approach to world affairs, and cited his opposition to Roe v. Wade as evidence that he posed a grave threat to the rights of women. I argued that his choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate exposed his poor judgment and reckless approach to important decisions. However, we primarily focused on competing ideas and policies, never became hostile or acrimonious, and, unlike Obama and McCain, usually respected our time limits.

As in other parts of the world, our audiences clearly favored Obama over McCain for the presidency, but were very careful not to demonstrate this bias overtly. Questions were balanced, audience members applauded both presentations, and no votes were taken on who “won” the debates. I also believe that many of the women in the audience were pleasantly surprised to see a woman standing in effectively for John McCain. The debates generated some press coverage in Russia, but none in the United States.

Perhaps our most interesting question came from one student who asked why we were debating so vigorously and passionately, given that no votes were at stake for either candidate in Russia. Ann and I both agreed that we relished the chance to test our ideas against a worthy opponent and to demonstrate to a Russian audience how candidates freely compete against one another in the United States. Left unsaid was our belief that this exercise was especially important at a time when Russia seemed to be spinning backwards into the autocratic practices of past years.

Allan J. Lichtman is a professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C. and OAH Distinguished Lecturer since 2004. His most recent books are White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (Grove/Atlantic, 2008) and The Keys to the White House, 2008 Edition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).