In the coming months George W. Bush, John Kerry, and their running mates will submit themselves to a relatively new ritual in American presidential politics: a series of face-to-face debates. Broadcast on television and radio throughout the world, the presidential debates are the political world’s equivalent of football’s Super Bowl, with all the attendant media hype but no lewd halftime show to overshadow the proceedings.

Young American voters—to use a phrase that some pollsters regard as an oxymoron—might be surprised to learn that once upon a time presidential candidates campaigned quite deliberately on parallel tracks. Their paths never crossed, save on occasions like the exclusive Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York, when they exchanged not ideas but witticisms, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. In fact the very notion of campaigning for the Presidency, never mind debating an opponent, would have struck some candidates in the early nineteenth century as undignified, and that was long before Bill Clinton discussed his choice of underwear in 1992.

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