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Who won Monday night’s debate? The short answer: no one knows. The longer answer: it doesn’t matter, or at any rate it doesn’t matter who I or anyone else thinks won. Yet that is the substance of most post-debate commentary — who “won,” as if that were the issue, as if anyone even knew what that meant.

In time we will find out if one or more of the leaders succeeded, in the course of two hours of crosstalk, name-calling and canned rhetoric, in persuading a significant number of voters to change their minds about them, maybe even to change their vote. It happens, sometimes. But we would do better, as media folk, to try to aid their deliberations, to say what we think the debate revealed about each candidate’s character, judgment and priorities, than to guess in advance, usually wrongly, at what the public might eventually conclude.

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Still less helpful is it to score the participants on their debating prowess. An election is not a debating tournament. We are not picking the best public speaker, but which leader and party we prefer should represent us in Parliament, and by virtue of their numbers, form a government. Neither are we choosing a boyfriend: it is interesting to note which leader looked most at ease or came off as most “likeable,” but that is not ultimately what the voters are asked to decide.