Debate unlikely to sway US election outcome

AFTER a young and attractive Democratic presidential candidate, John F Kennedy, and his tired and subdued Republican adversary, Richard Nixon, met in 1960 for the first presidential debate in history, almost everything we had known about American politics changed.

Then Senator Kennedy was trailing then vice-president Nixon going into that debate and the general consensus was that the inexperienced Catholic politician from Massachusetts would lose in the race against the much respected Nixon who for eight years was working side-by-side with a popular president, Dwight Eisenhower.

But the televised debate ended up changing the direction of the 1960 presidential campaign. What American television viewers saw was an elegant and calm JFK (today we would describe him as "cool") holding his own against the nervous Nixon, who did not wear make-up and, with a five o'clock shadow, was perspiring all the time; and they concluded that Kennedy had "won" the debate (interestingly enough, those who listened to the debate on the radio picked Nixon as the winner).