I really can't stand these debates.

And it is not because of the candidates. I enjoy watching them debate each other, and I thought they made it worth my while last night.

No. The reason that I cannot stand these debates is the media and the insufferable assumption that frames all of its analysis: voters are exactly like journalists. They pay as much attention as journalists do. They are as interested in the tactics as journalists are. They enjoy all of the thrusting and parrying of the rhetorical joust as much as journalists do.

This view was on display everywhere last night and this morning - from CNN's pre-debate analysis to the pundit reviews that followed. Find a debate analysis or scorecard that does not focus on tactics first, tactics second, tactics third - and maybe, if there is still room, policy fourth. Said scorecard will invariably go on to draw an inference about who helped their electoral prospects by being the best tactician of the night. Implicit in this view, of course, is the assumption that voters think about politics in exactly the same terms.

This is a narrow view of politics: the press collects seven people on a stage, knowing that one of them will be the next Democratic nominee and could very well be the next President of the United States, and has no interest except in whether they slap each other around a little bit. This is a solipsistic view of politics: journalists "know" that Americans find the gamesmanship of politics to be loathsome. Nevertheless, their analysis is predicated upon the assumption that Americans like it as much as the journalists do. This is a false view of politics: this way of analyzing the electorate has no empirical basis in reality - which journalists would quickly discover if they read more widely than what their fellow journalists are writing.

Narrow, solipsistic, and false. An impoverished view of politics.

This is why I do not like these primary debates. They concentrate everything wrong about the way the media covers presidential campaigns and jam-packs it into two hours. And then you have all of the endless, mindless, group-think "analysis" that follows. As if this morning's conclusion was not wholly predictable. Provided that Clinton did not trip when she walked onto the stage - the media was gonna conclude, "The kid stays in the picture!"

Enough already! If post-debate conventional wisdom was a machine, I would throw stones at it and curse in French.

Or, to quote Gelman and King (again):

"Journalists should realize that they can report the polls all they want, and continue to make incorrect causal inferences about them, but they are not helping to predict or even influence the election. Journalists play a critical role in enabling voters to make decisions based upon the equivalent of explicitly enlightened preferences. Unfortunately, by focusing more on the polls and meaningless campaign events, the media are spending more and more time on "news" that has less and less of an effect."