"This same progeny of evils comes from our debate"

— Titania, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Scene 1.

I heard the first hour of Prezlemania III on the radio. Yawn. Same creamed chipped beef, different toast.

The night before the Ronald Reagan-Fritz Mondale debate in 1984, Mondale's family staged a mock debate between two dogs, a Rottweiler and a German shepherd. In People magazine afterward, journalist Michael Small wrote:

"To their credit, neither candidate said anything that would damage his campaign, and neither bit his opponent."

The three Bush-Kerry set-tos have been pretty much like that.

As pundit Peter Goldman noted following the aforementioned Reagan-Mondale debate (the actual one between the candidates, not the one with the shepherd and the Rottweiler):

"A debate before 70 million people is in fact a distorting glass, a fun-house mirror in which wrinkles look like canyons and hesitation like an attack of amnesia."

It's hard to imagine anything said between Kerry and Bush swaying an undecided voter in either direction. People who haven't yet made up their minds will probably just Rho-Sham-Bo before they step into the booth on November 2.