Atrios (and many others) post links (now inactive) and text from AP's coverage of the debates. You will notice that I am posting this before the debates take place...
I'm neither as shocked or appalled as I should be. The debates are a charade. I have no intention to watch them - what point would there be? I have a pretty good idea where these guys are going to take us - what could change? Now - if I were on the fence, sure - but I'm not... I don't really expect anything inspiring or horrible to happen - in fact, I don't expect anything real to happen. The debates are a pretext to the discussion of the debates (which I refuse to call "spin"), which is mostly - on the blogs, on the cable channels and radio and whatever - a game among political junkies that is no more related to actual politics than arguing about your fantasy team is to the world series. Except that the world series is, itself, something of a real event - and political campaigns have been pretty well emptied of any content.
Once someone gets in office, of course, they can start to do some harm (or, potentially, good, though who expects that?) - but that's almost an accidental by-product. You might have thought that in this day and age - in the middle of a (stunningly ill-advised) war, etc., that things might have swerved toward seriousness, but I'm afraid not. JohnKerry, I suppose, sort of tries to feign seriousness, but even he seems more like he's playign a politician than he is one. I miss Howard Dean - who shot off his mouth and went after actual issues. But that's not what we have. Though I wish we geta bit more of that - get on the issues and stay there and get people to think about the issues, at least hear about the issues, every day.
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