This morning, NPR’s “Morning Edition” had a segment on undecided voters, many of whom felt like they needed to see another debate to make up their minds. If they want solid information, they can wait for 50 more debates and they still won’t get it. Since there is no mechanism in the debates for any assessment of “truth,” details remain hazy. After McCain challenged Obama on his health care proposal and asserted that Obama would fine people who didn’t get health care for those they were responsible for, Obama fired back that McCain would offer a $5,000 tax credit for health insurance, but would also tax it. On a follow-up, McCain restated the rightness of his tax credit plan, but he didn’t address whether or not he’d tax it. Does that mean he would? Unless you go hunting for that information, you don’t know. Only after McCain noted that Obama hadn’t denied that he’d fine people for not buying health insurance did Obama deny it. Was that late, under duress denial an indicator that McCain is right? We won’t know unless we go looking for that as well.

With no mechanism in place to adjudicate one man speaking apples to the other’s oranges, we’re left to evaluate more intangible characteristics, which (to my eye) favors Obama. He’s clearly calmer, he’s clearly thinking, and he’s disciplined. With a lead in the polls, he stuck to his talking points even though it made the whole “debate” seem like a watered down clone of the debate two weeks ago. Eventually, he got to the questions asked, but he avoided making negative news by staying on message. Next to him, McCain looked awkward – partially, an unavoidable function of his P.O.W. injuries, partially a function of his melanoma, but partially a result of things he could control. His attempts to slide wisecrack asides into the middle of sentences were never funny, and when he cranked that Obama still hasn’t admitted that he was wrong about the surge, he sounded like half of an old married couple still chewing on 20-plus-year-old spats.

What the debates need is a moderator who is allowed to not only ask follow-up questions but who could pursue a fact-based point until it reached resolution. Or, a fact checker who could put the corroboration or  evidence of what a candidate is referring to on the screen, or who could put up the information to show that the speaker is lying. As is, the closest we get to a fact checking function comes the next day in the paper, and it too is balanced, so we leave the story with the impression that they both lie, and we have the same problem.

I’m not holding my breath for this format change to occur. I can’t imagine any campaign agreeing to such a change, but until that happens, we’re really watching them as performances. Information is simply the material they’re performing with.