The American electorate has now had its first in-depth inspection of the main presidential candidates and their running mates as they debated earlier this week. But how much wiser are the future voters?
"Gore's still unlikeable. Bush still seems dumb. Feels like a tie," was the cynical verdict of one member of the punditocracy after Tuesday's debate.
The low-key, civilised debate between the vice-presidential candidates on Thursday night got rave reviews from the editorial writers. Lieberman and Cheney were praised for conducting "a courtly discussion", devoid of the "Grade B show-biz qualities" exhibited by their masters in their debate. But secretly the pundits would have liked some blood on the floor.
This campaign is heaven for the pundits. Unlike the last four elections when the dogs in the street could pick the winner at this stage in the campaign, this time the race is too close. So a daily fix of punditry is essential.
The good thing about the debates, which can be boring for long periods, is supposed to be that the candidates can show themselves without being processed through what George Bush calls "the media filter". Like Al Gore, Bush has had mixed experiences with the media.
Both men have had rollercoaster rides where glowing press coverage has suddenly collapsed into sour commentaries and nit-picking about their gaffes and mistakes which can get magnified by being repeated ad nauseam on 24-hour cable news stations.
The result can be an electorate totally confused about what the candidates stand for as distinct from how they mispronounce certain words, whether they look stiff and what kind of clothes they wear.
So when on Tuesday night Mr Gore and Mr Bush stood behind lecterns at Massachusetts University facing interrogation from one of the country's most respected journalists for 90 minutes, it was a chance to leave the trivia aside and get down to basics. Which man would make the best president for a country immersed in prosperity and freer from external threat than at any time in its history?
Of course, it did not work out that way. Did Mr Gore wear too much make-up? Why did he sigh and roll his eyes while Mr Bush was speaking? Women watching were said to hate the sighing and eye-rolling "because their husbands do it".
And why was Mr Bush sniffling so much? Why did he stare vacantly "with a crooked-mouth look" while Mr Gore was launched on one of his lectures? One Republican woman commentator said Mr Gore reminded her of "one of those creepy kids everyone hated in class".
It was easier to answer these questions than to work out if Mr Gore was right when he said about 10 times that Mr Bush's $1.3 trillion tax cut would provide more money in tax breaks for the wealthiest 1 per cent of Americans than he would provide in new spending for education, healthcare, prescription drugs and national defence over the next 10 years.
And is Mr Bush right when he says that under Mr Gore's plan 50 million Americans would get no tax relief at all?
And talking about prescription drugs, under whose plan would senior citizens do best? Mr Gore said that Mr Bush's plan would help only 5 per cent of seniors in the first four to five years but Mr Bush said they would get immediate help.
Both campaigns had their experts in "Spin Alley" next door to the debate hall where the details of rival plans were revealed in mind-numbing complexity. You were also encouraged to log on to the Bush website to get rebuttals as the words came out of Mr Gore's mouth. The Gore website seemed to have "prebuttals" which anticipated what Mr Bush was going to say.
The voters needed media help the next day to make sense of the figures which were being flung around. As one pollster put it: "The voting class relies on the chattering class to tell them what they missed in 90 minutes." But Robert Bixby, a budgetary expert, in the Concord Coalition, said he was totally confused by the exchanges on social security.
The dean of the Annenberg School of Communications, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, sympathised with viewers. "If you didn't come in having a reasonable amount of knowledge, you could walk away more confused, in particular on prescription drugs and social security," she said.
So are these debates any help? In one of the morning-after polls 96 per cent said they had not changed their minds after listening to the candidates.
One news agency asked five high school and university debate coaches to give their verdicts. James Unger of the National Forensics Institute said some viewers might have drawn only one conclusion: "Both candidates want to be president very, very much."
That figures.