I started watching this debate hoping that Nick Clegg would wipe the floor with the other guys. This is not solely because Pavlovianly, I salivate at any mention of the words “Liberal Democrat”; in the past (from a safe distance to be sure) I’ve always preferred Labour, even when poor old threadbare Michael Foot was in charge. But if Clegg and the Lib Dems do well enough on May 6th to deny either of the two parties a parliamentary majority, then the United Kingdom will get some kind of proportional or semi-proportional electoral reform. And, because the British constitution is the prototype from which our own is derived, that might at last spark some interest in that sort of thing on this side of the Atlantic. (As regular readers of this blog know, electoral reform is my Holy Grail cum White Whale. If you want details, look to this blog’s Electoral Reform category.)

Post-debate, I have to say that the floor remains unwiped. Clegg did well, but not as well as I’d hoped; David Cameron, the Tory leader, did equally well or maybe a little better. Sad, weary Prime Minister Gordon Brown more or less held his own, but this is a change election and he appeared resigned to the inevitable. Mainly, though, I was struck by how superior this event was to its typical American counterpart, in a number of ways:

The crispness and clarity of the debaters.

The businesslike, non-preening moderator, David Dimbleby—the Brits, it seems, still have a Cronkite.

The audience, which listened attentively and respected what I assume was a request to refrain from applauding or hooting or otherwise behaving like a mob or a claque.

The fact that neither Cameron nor Clegg went medieval on Brown for his ridiculous “bigot” gaffe—not that doing so would have benefitted them, given British manners.

The near-total lack of obviously rehearsed zingers. (Emphasis on obviously.)

The fact that none of the candidates appeared to be a sociopath, a delusionary, a demagogue, or a serious neurotic. They all seem to be relatively decent people.

The topic was the economy, and some of the themes and patterns faintly echoed our own. The Conservative wants to cut both social spending and taxes on business. The Labourite wants to keep public spending up as long as economic recovery is uncertain—a classic Keynesian argument. Cameron, by contrast, drew the hoary, faulty old analogy between family budgets and national ones. The Lib Dem wants some sort of post-election domestic summit to get real on the budget: tripartisanship, I suppose, which goes Obama one better. And immigration is an issue that makes all three of them visibly uncomfortable.

But the differences make an American a little envious. Cameron wants to cut inheritance taxes on the well-off, but not, apparently, on the superrich. (And the inheritance tax is called by its proper name. Unlike American conservatives, the Tories haven’t got around to dubbing it the “death tax.”) Even though Cameron mentioned in his closing statement that “I love this country,” there was no boastful “patriotism,” no chest-pounding about The Greatest Nation On Earth. And no one mentioned the menace of “socialized medicine.”

I have qualms about the Americanization—the Presidentialization—of British politics. These debates change the focus from the parties and their policies (which are outlined in manifestos that are taken seriously, even by those who draw them up) to the leaders and their personalities. I’m not sure that what Western democracies need is greater fealty to the Führerprinzip.

There is a middle way, and, unsurprisingly, it’s Swedish. The best TV debate I ever saw was in Sweden, in 1976. The leaders of the four main parties at the time sat behind a semicircular desk. Because the Social Democrats were twice the size of any of the others, they got an extra seat, occupied by their economic spokesman, and a little extra time. The best feature of the debate was this: behind each politician was a chair occupied by an aide. Throughout the two hours, the pols would confer in whispers with their aides, who frequently passed them notes. This, I remember thinking at the time, rendered the event unlike the sort of high school debate cum memorization contest we are accustomed to in the United States and made it into something more closely resembling the actual work of government.

I would recommend this practice to the British, before it’s too late.