Do you want to take the night off? This is what you need to know. Willard Romney will "do what he has to do" to maintain the illusion of his being a carbon-based life form. The president, on the other hand, because he is "more comfortable with the town-hall format," also will do "everything he has to do" to recover from the fiasco he handed the nation in the first of the presidential debates not yet thirteen days ago. The debate likely "will not move the needle" in any direction, although Romney's performance likely "may allay some doubts about his ability to connect with ordinary voters," while the president's performance likely "will reassure nervous Democrats who only last week wondered if he really wanted the job."

There. Done. Now you can all watch Sons of Anarchy, or re-runs of NCIS, and wonder how Illya Kuryakin grew up to reek of formaldehyde on behalf of the U.S. Navy.

I have yet to leave home for the events in Hemptstead on Tuesday evening, and still the horse-race template of this second debate is already set. It is a paint-by-numbers deal for the elite political media, most of which, I guarantee you, already knows what it's going to say at the end of the night. Unless Romney comes out dressed like Anton LaVey, or the president starts reading, unbidden, from Soul On Ice, nothing either of these guys say to Candy Crowley and a room full of New Yorkers will be treated as being of any real consequence. Romney has so battered the political dialogue — and the English language — with his 100-pound bullshit sledge that he has pretty much shaped the narrative of the campaign in such a fashion that his fanatical devotion to barefaced non-facts has become a weird kind of status quo. Far too many people in this business have accepted the Etch-A-Sketch argument to the point at which whether something is true or not is measured by its effectiveness as a tactic. "He had to run to the right in the primaries and then 'pivot' to the center in the general" — that's something that makes the political wiseguys look smart, but, taken literally, it means that the entire election process in the world's oldest self-governing republic is a contest to find out who can most smoothly move from one set of lies to another, and it is also a recipe for depriving the people who ultimately will make that decision of the kind of information they need to do so. How this is in any way good for democracy is not for small minds to ponder, I guess.

Which is why, in my goofy optimistic way, I am clinging to the town-hall format as my last hope that anything resembling something new and interesting will break through the din of a campaign aimed almost completely at the twelve undecided voters left in America. (The "ordinary voters" selected to participate on Tuesday evening are all "undecided voters" chosen by Gallup. All due respect to their honesty, and to Gallup's due diligence, but that data indicate that, given the fact that they need enough people to fill up a ninety-minute debate, some of those people lied their asses off to get the gig.) It is the last stand for spontaneity, the last possibility of a human moment before both candidates climb back into their bubbles and bounce across the landscape the way that white blob on The Prisoner used to do it. It will be the last chance for flesh and blood before the election roars to its inevitable conclusion as a bloodbath of decimal points.

It is possible, though admittedly unlikely, that one of the folks tasked to ask questions on Tuesday evening will ask a question for which one or both of these guys is unprepared. (At this point, I'll settle for someone who asks anything about the global climate crisis, because nobody has so far, and because watching Romney's inevitable "pivot" from climate change to his support for the Keystone XL pipeline would be as entertaining as watching him break-dance.) That kind of human moment wouldn't, please god, be so much a "boxers or briefs" question — although Romney would be the only candidate in history whose answer actually might be interesting — as something drawn from the real lives of real people, from someone who, say, actually has to take her kids to the emergency room for basic medical care, or someone else who actually works in a soup kitchen and is thus qualified and capable to call out the endless fraudulence of how we run the day-to-day operations of this quadrennial design competition.

It's a thin reed, I know. The people asking the questions at Hofstra University have been poked and prodded and vetted and, for all I know, fed tranquilizers, so that nothing will disturb the peaceful and blessed "centrism" and "balance" for which the organizers strive to the exclusion of all that nasty human unpredictability that can get people so damned worked up. The problem, of course, is that we should all want these people to be worked up. The country is still a very tough room for far too many people. Living in America has become hard, grinding work, not altogether because of factors beyond out control, but also because of what we have let our politics become. People should be angry. People should be grim. If, as always happens, somebody comes up with a genuine tale of sorrow and woe, the candidates should be allowed to emphasize for one entire minute and then, dammit, they should be expected either to tell this person specifically how their policies would alleviate the person's situation, or why that person is simply going to have to suck it up while we get things in order for the bond traders.

Spontaneity ends on Tuesday night. The rest is scripted and tailored and approximately as spontaneous as the Orange Bowl halftime show. It should be encouraged and cheered. And, if someone asks the one question that stumps both these guys, the reaction should not be that avoiding the answer was good politics. The reaction should be just answer the damn question.

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POLL UPDATE: With National Lead, Romney's Vision for Etch-A-Sketch America Takes Hold

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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