I don’t usually blog on political topics, but here are a few things I realized watching the debate last night.

1. I am not the audience for this debate.

I actually wanted a debate. I got a glorified press junket. Each question was used by each candidate as an off ramp for talking points. In the few instances where they actually answered a question, they spent only ten seconds of their 90 seconds answering the question and the rest talking about something tangentially related to the question.

Being a movie guy, this reminded of nothing so much as how when you ask a celebrity who has a new movie coming out about their kids, they’ll somehow bring it back to how their character in the new film is “a really dedicated father.” This is nothing new and I completely understand why they do it. When else are they going to get this much free access to this many viewers? But it’s not a debate.

In some cases this was because the question was phrased poorly. When Ifill asked a question that was basically a job interview question, “What is your greatest weakness?”, she asked it in a way that said “People think a or b is your weakness, but what is it really?” which pretty much guarantees that the candidate will spend their time addressing a or b.

In some cases they just dodged the damn question. Ifill asked under what circumstances either candidate would use nuclear weapons. Do you know what those circumstances are? Neither do I, because neither of them said. (I don’t blame them, necessarily, for not wanting to commit to a nuclear strategy on live television, but still, not a debate).

(Speaking of nuclear weapons, how is it that Palin can pronounce “Ahmadinejad” flawlessly but can’t pronounce “nuclear”?)

2. I want a new rule

If I were running a debate, I would institute a rule that prevented candidates from using phrases they had used on ten or more previous occasions during the campaign. Try using a cliche in a real debate and see how far that gets you.

3. It really doesn’t matter what Palin says.

This is based on an iron clad law of communication, which I knew, but have never seen embodied so perfectly. You’ve got, what, 38 percent of communication based on tone and another 55 percent based on body language. Once Palin got past her first few questions jitters, she had those two down.

Now her tone is love-it-or-hate-it, but she owns it. She is the one human being who can use the phrase “doggone it” unironically in the 21st Century. That has appeal for a lot of people. She could stand there saying “Puppies are awesome!” for two hours and some will come away loving her and some will come away hating her but only a few will come away saying, “Does anyone else think she’s a little too focused on puppies?”

4. The only real surprise of the evening was Biden’s tears.

I found myself glazing over after the first question, once I was sure Biden wasn’t going to let forth with a torrent of f-bombs or that Palin wasn’t going to, I don’t know, freak out. But when Biden got choked up, I suddenly checked back in. It was the one truly human moment in the debate for me. (And no, I don’t know if it was planned, but if it was, it worked.)

I’d like to think that in one of the future debates we’ll get an actual debate, but it’s really not in the best interests of the candidates to let that happen. You think if I invited McCain and Obama over to debate at my house and promised not to publish or broadcast anything that was said they’d actually get into some shit? Me, neither.