And what are we to make of all this? There wasn’t any car crash, but we have been trained to regard every twitch, tic and failure to look engaged as a matter of possibly cosmic consequence. The next leader of the most powerful nation on earth needs to be the person with the best comebacks, but the fewest strange facial expressions.

It’s a little like one of those fairy tales where the citizens of the kingdom pick their next king on the basis of a race to find the feather of the golden swan.

Do debates really matter? The experts say that, barring total disaster, the answer is actually no.

The committed are already committed. (In some cases, really, really committed. Witness the large proportion of Ohio Republicans who told a pollster that they thought Mitt Romney was the person most responsible for killing Osama bin Laden.)

It’s all about the voters with failure to commit. CNN managed to corral some of them to register their responses to the debate’s every jab and parry. I kept peeping at the lines recording their emotions, and I swear there were long stretches where the Undecideds nodded off.

Still, you don’t want to mess these things up. No candidate wants to repeat the saga of Rick Lazio, who ran against Hillary Clinton for the United States Senate in New York in 2000. During a critical debate, Lazio tried to be clever by walking over and asking Clinton to sign a campaign fund-raising pledge. It made him look less like a senator than a stalker, and now, a dozen years later, Hillary Clinton is known as one of the most beloved figures on the planet, while Lazio is known as the guy who once violated Hillary Clinton’s space.

All I know is that you deserve a hand, interested citizen. You really have been through a lot. You were there for the Rick Perry meltdown and the Mitch Daniels blip, and the period when we had to get up to speed on Newt Gingrich’s marital history. And now we’ve still got two more presidential debates plus one vice-presidential debate. Then we will be moving into the final two weeks, sometimes known as the Actually Having an Election period.

Did you read John Noble Wilford’s article in The Times about the discovery of the remains of a dinosaur the size of a house cat? A paleontologist told Wilford that it might have looked like a “nimble two-legged porcupine.” I am telling you this because the race for the Republican nomination first began at about the time these creatures became extinct. Michele Bachmann shot the last one when it hopped across her front yard.