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Photo credit: Brooks Kraft/Corbis

Recently I did what no sane person would: I watched the entire set of presidential primary debates, in sequence, like a boxed set of a TV show. In scale this was like three or four seasons worth of The Sopranos . The Democrats had 26 debates, nearly all more than one hour long, and all but one of them with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The Republicans had 21, if you count the session for which a single debater showed up. That was the NAACP forum in Detroit, which all eight Democrats but only Representative Tom Tancredo of the Republicans agreed to attend. I had seen only two of the debates in real time because so few were carried internationally. Those that were available in streaming video were too slow and jerky to be watchable in China, where I ve been living. (It eventually took more than two weeks of round-the-clock Internet downloading to collect all the files.)

Reagan dismisses Carter with a There you go again in 1980

There have been nine series of televised general-election debates. These started with Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, resumed with Ford-Carter in 1976, and have been a campaign fixture ever since. In all but one election, the debates produced a moment that figured in the ultimate outcome. (The exception was Clinton-Dole in 1996, when neither man said anything that changed a voter s mind.) The dramatic exchanges that made a difference Ronald Reagan s amused and dismissive There you go again against Jimmy Carter in 1980, Michael Dukakis s too-composed look when asked in 1988 how he would react if his wife were raped, George H.W. Bush s desperate when will this end? glance at his wristwatch during a town-hall session with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot in 1992, Al Gore s operatic sighs about George W. Bush in 2000 would have passed unnoticed in a transcript. The transcript conveys only part of, for example, the alarming meandering in Ronald Reagan s soliloquy at the end of his second 1984 debate with Walter Mondale. Reagan, looking confused and forgetting his point, was rescued only when the moderator, Edwin Newman, announced that time was up: Mr. President, I m obliged to cut you off there, under the rules of the debate. I m sorry. Mondale should have been sorry, too.

For the Democrats, though, the debates were dramatic in themselves and important in shaping the result. Hillary Clinton seriously blew only one answer of the countless hundreds she delivered. That was her fumbling response on whether she thought illegal immigrants should get driver s licenses delivered 100 minutes into a late-night debate in Philadelphia last October, when she looked drained. As with Gerald Ford s famous fumbled comments about Eastern Europe when debating Jimmy Carter in 1976, what she meant to say was obvious. Ford meant to say that the Poles and others behind the Iron Curtain had an unconquerable spirit and would never accept Soviet domination. What he actually said, and dug himself in on, was that they were free.