From The Washington Post
By Jim Hoagland

Candidates Obama, McCain, Biden and Palin, take a bow. And you in the huge television audiences, bask in the reflected glory. You all have established in two national political debates that a lot is going right in America, despite our enormous problems.

The value of these debates comes not from any particular information they convey. Voters know they get spit-polished views confected by campaign consultants from polling data. So they greet Barack Obama’s endorsement of an immediate NATO membership plan for Ukraine, or Sarah Palin’s pledge to work on peace in the Middle East, with appropriate skepticism.

But these debates have become important conveyor belts of indelible attitude and character, of trend-sensing and zeitgeist, sliced into digestible 90-minute segments. Our most successful politicians reformat what we have told them about who we are and what we want, and they play it back to us in ways that reveal much about us and, at times, them.

And they do so under the pressure of television’s relentlessly clicking clock, the ultimate arbiter and mix-master of entertainment and political values. The unfulfilled opportunity that Palin would crash and burn — that is, show definitively that she is John McCain’s Achilles’ high heel — turned Thursday night’s clash with Joe Biden into “must-see television,” our society’s equivalent of a pilgrimage to Lourdes or Mecca.

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