I've got a particular interest in debates, having been a high school and college debater and, for a blissfully short time afterwards, a high school debate coach.
Competitive policy debate has very little to do with political debates (trust me), but being involved with debate as long as I have has a way of rubbing off on you.

I'm cutting life short to make sure I watch the Thursday Kerry/Bush debate.

What do I expect? Who knows? Krugman seems to think that our captive press will trumpet a Bush victory no matter how the debate actually goes:

Let's face it: whatever happens in Thursday's debate, cable news will proclaim President Bush the winner. This will reflect the political bias so evident during the party conventions. It will also reflect the undoubted fact that Mr. Bush does a pretty good Clint Eastwood imitation.

In a particularly good post, Atrios says he expects more of the same fantasyland crap from Bush that we've been getting lately:

As for my pre-debate spin, which has the added benefit of being honest, is that what we're going to get from Bush is the exact same thing we've been getting from him throughout his presidency. We'll get "happy talk" on Iraq which contradicts reality. We'll get "tough talk" on unnamed terrrorists, despite the fact that Ashcroft hasn't managed to convict any. We'll get "happy talk" on Afghanistan, with Bush doing things like hilariously claiming that the "Taliban is no longer in existence." We'll probably get some shockingingly unpresidential behavior, including the inappropriate humor he so loves.

But, what we probably won't get is anything new. Same shit, different night, as Iraq continues to burn.

Ezra from Pandagon snarks on the things that the Bush team especially wanted. Draw your own conclusions:

[NYT:] Still, officials of the debate commission said they were agreeing primarily to those things Mr. Bush's aides had emphasized as especially important to them: a strict time limit on candidate responses, an electronic warning when candidates exceed their speaking time that can be seen and heard by viewers at home, and a prohibition against the candidates' directly posing questions to each other.

[Ezra:] So the Bush campaign is particularly concerned that candidates will have too much time to explain their policies, viewers won't know that a speaker has exceeded their time limit, and the two men vying to lead our nation might be able to engage each other's ideas directly. Were I a Republican, I'd be so damn proud right now...

Marie at Left Coaster is tired of the whole damn thing:

The worst thing about this set is that it’s bad TV. It’s boring. Two old white men standing at podiums and pretending to answer easy questions is not visually stimulating. For the most part they don’t even answer the question. They pawn off-well memorized 120 second speeches that address some component of the question, but really only answer the question as phrased by their trainers, but the audience never gets to hear that question and therefore are left to puzzle out what the question was. Mini-speeches not designed to inform the public but only to make them look strong, resolute, commanding and not dumb.

James Fallows, author of an excellent piece on the debating styles of Kerry and Bush in the Atlantic Monthly, has been hitting the radio circuit. You can listen to him, and others, talk to Michael Krasny* of KQED San Francisco for an hour about the debates here.

If you've seen footage of Bush at his campaign events lately, standing mike in hand, sans podium, you have to admit that he's got a certain snarky cowboy quality that comes across really well with dumb people. I expect he'll do okay in the debates -- good enough. Kerry needs to kill, and I don't know if he's got it in him.

[An Aside Regarding Michael Krasny: I listen to a lot of radio. Krasny is the finest local radio host I've ever heard, bar none. He should have a bigger platform.]