No, they didn't ask then-Senator Kennedy about the woman he spent the afternoon with, or how much it cost his father to buy the West Virginia primary. With then-Vice President Nixon they never got around to Howard Hughes's secret contributions, or administration plots to kill Patrice Lumumba and invade Cuba. That was before either candidates or the media succumbed to sound-bite policies, and in many ways it's been downhill since. Read the transcripts in Sidney Kraus's The Great Debates for the sheer substance, depth, and spontaneity we should reclaim for the prototype. We're electing not just a president but an entire administration, people whose character, views, interaction will define a presidency as much as its occupant.
People are substance.
Never let candidates define the field. Be ready here, as everywhere, to poke holes and press the point. Probe the records of both for the expedience that is the heart of politics. Pin each to his performance. Too many people see too little connection between political activity and real life, between the questions they discuss around the workplace and the dialogue they hear in candidate debates.