Mitchell wasn’t being ironic in her deeming of Obama’s failure-to-zing as an actual, and overall failure. Nor was Brooks. Nor was George Will, when, punditing with George Stephanapoulos on Friday night, he argued that, emphasis mine, “Barack Obama came out and looked comfortable and as though he belonged there. So, in a sense, the structure of the debate, indeed, the fact of the debate had to give a mild leg up to Barack Obama.” Nor were the other pundits who subscribed to the whole bite-makes-right line of debate-success logic, among them the editorial board of The New York Times, emphasis, again, mine:

Mr. McCain fumbled his way through the economic portion of the debate, while Mr. Obama seemed clear and confident. Mr. McCain was more fluent on foreign affairs, and scored points by repeatedly calling Mr. Obama naïve and inexperienced.

But Mr. McCain’s talk of experience too often made him sound like a tinny echo of the 20th century. At one point, he talked about how Ronald Reagan’s “S.D.I.” helped end the cold war. We suspect that few people under the age of 50 caught the reference. If he was reaching for Reagan’s affable style, he missed by a mile, clenching his teeth and sounding crotchety where Reagan was sunny and avuncular.

The message in all this is clear: Per the pundits, the style of delivery is much more important than what, in the end, is being delivered. And, to an extent, fair enough. The whole they’re-as-much-about-style-as-substance assumption when it comes to presidential debates is a truism, after all. The Famous Debate Moments in the History of Presidential Politics—and the Infamous—are rendered so, in general, not because they’ve provided bursts of brilliance, policy-wise, on the part of our executive aspirants, but rather because they’ve offered the moments of superficial serendipity—the barbs! the zingers! the chuckles! the subconscious facial tics!—that we’ve come to value in live television.

We generally don’t, as conduits of mass memory, recall the specifics of what was debated in the 1960 debate between Kennedy and Nixon; we remember, instead, Kennedy’s telegenic charm and Nixon’s five-o’clock shadow. Just as we remember Bush 41’s fixation on his wristwatch. And Al Gore’s frustrated sighs. And Ross Perot’s ears. Et cetera.

And when we do actually remember the substance of the presidential debates—words, words, words, and all that—we rarely remember facts and lines of logic so much as we recall zing-tastic barbs and turns of phrase (“Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy,” “There you go again,” etc.). We focus on the dukes-out, knockout aspect of the debates. We focus, in other words, on Who Wins.

Yet the very notion that it’s the press’s job to declare a winner or a loser in each debate is flawed, not least because the assumption of either/or itself enforces a focus on the superficial. Winning and losing, after all, is the ultimate black-and-white issue. And inscription into the confines of the who-won-and-who-lost framework discourages—indeed, almost single-handedly prevents—nuanced assessments from journalists. (You could even argue that it discourages nuance from the candidates themselves, since they structure their own debate performances to fit the standards set by the media.)

On the one hand, the winner/loser setup of debates is convenient for journalists: It’s hard to analyze the substance of a debate in any intellectually honest way without also opening yourself up to accusations of partisanship. So the fact that journalists often focus on the “hard evidence” of facial cues and tone of voice and insults uttered and the like, giving themselves a bit of insulation from ideology-based accusations, is understandable. But that doesn’t make it any less unfortunate. Because that tendency encourages the media—and their audiences along with them—to ascribe undue value to the stylistic minutiae of each debate, rather than the substance of what’s being debated: the policy proposals and the revelations-of-candidates’-thought-processes and the like that together are, ostensibly, The Whole Point of the Debates in the First Place.

So here’s a radical idea, for Thursday night and beyond: Let’s stop thinking in terms of winning and losing when it comes to the debates. Since doing so serves, in the end, nobody. Let’s instead remember that, though the debates are media events on live TV, they’re much more than an amalgamation of visual cues and aural barbs: Each debate presents a rich text bursting with policy proposals and assumptions about government and other revelations just begging to be analyzed and parsed and explained.

An unprecedented number of people are paying attention to politics right now, and to the big political events—the convention speeches, the debates—in particular. They’re doing so not because they’re hoping to see a gaffe, or because they want to judge for themselves whether Candidate A has, indeed, snubbed Candidate B, but because they want to witness those texts firsthand. They’re paying attention, ultimately, because the stakes are high, and they want to know—yes, in dull, wonky, bo-ring detail—the direction each candidate wants to take the country. They want more than a boxing match played out in words and gestures; and they want, from the media, more than political sportscasting. They really do want substance. So let’s give it to them. If we do, everyone will win.

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