WAITING FOR THE GAFFE

The nation anxiously awaits Tuesday night’s debate. Will Barack Obama bounce back from his desultory performance of two weeks ago, a performance that increases in desultoriness with each retelling, particularly retellings by Republican-leaning pundits?

Will Barack managed to knock that weird smirk off Mr. Mitt’s face, a task that none of Mr. Mitt’s challengers in the Republican primaries managed to do, but then that crowd was not exactly the cream of the crop?

Will Mr. Mitt be able to continue his thus far successful etch-a-sketch strategy of morphing from a centrist-leaning governor of a left-leaning state, to a tea party conservative, to a moderate Northeastern Republican of the Nelson Rockefeller variety?

Will Candy Crowley be a Jim Lehr, a Martha Raddatz, or some new variant of I’m-in-charge moderator? The thought here is that Ms. Crowley just might be a bigger part of the show than anticipated, especially if Barack and Mr. Mitt get wild and wooly.

Barack will certainly be a different performer than in the first debate. But in the past he has not been an excitable guy, and excitable is apparently what political pundits want. And what political pundits want is what the supposedly independent thinking people end up wanting because most of those supposedly independent thinking people don’t know what they are thinking until the pundits tell them.

One thing both the pundits and the people would sorely love to witness is a major gaffe on the part of Barack, Mr. Mitt, or both. Gaffes do not necessarily result in permanent damage to a candidate’s chances, but they certainly provide entertainment of the first order. Watching a candidate try over a period of days and weeks to extract himself or herself from the sticky clutches of a gaffe is delicious fun. The gaffe becomes almost a living, breathing entity, a lion in the Roman Coliseum toying with a hapless slave. Maybe the slave will end up devoured. Or maybe the lion will tire of the game, leaving the slave shaken and mauled but still functioning in a zombie-like state. In either case, the blood-lust of the Coliseum crowd has been temporarily satiated.