Televised leader debates in Britain? First thought, from my brain: please, no, don't go there.
Second thought, from my journalist's heart: bring 'em on.
I've covered US presidential election campaigns since 1976, and I vaguely remember the first televised US presidential election debate (Kennedy-Nixon, 1960).
For better or worse – and probably mostly for worse – the debates here will be direct descendants of the highly paid professional campaign machinery that turned US presidential debates into a kind of political pabulum.
'Do no harm' is the fondest hope of political handlers as they send their candidates out onto the debate rostrum.
The idea is to avoid the sort of gaffe that can stall or sink a candidacy, such as when President Gerald Ford, debating Jimmy Carter in 1976, said,"There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration".
It's tempting to think that since 1976 the elements of surprise and accidental discovery have been squeezed out of high-stakes political debate by campaign strategists and spin-doctors.
Look at what's happened in America. The memorandums of understanding which govern the debates, negotiated as if they were nuclear non-proliferation treaties, contain prescriptions about the most banal matters.
The MOUs are so embarrassing that they're generally hidden from public view, but here's a sample from the 2004 presidential election campaign:
'The chairs shall be swivel chairs that can be locked in place, and shall be of equal height'; 'Each candidate may use his own makeup person'.
The idea is to not leave anything to chance, which makes sense, given the stakes and the cost ($2.4bn in 2008) of an American presidential race.
More often than not, however, the impact of a presidential debate on the electorate is not nil. It lies somewhere in between learning nothing and the killer gaffe.
In 2008, over the course of three presidential debates, Barack Obama was criticised for toning down his rhetoric and not taking on John McCain frontally.
In fact, by exuding the serenity of a natural leader, Obama grew in stature: he looked presidential.
During those same debates, even as the United States teetered on the brink of financial collapse, McCain's oddly frantic behaviour undermined his claim to the wisdom of experience.
As for his vice-presidential running mate, in her one debate against Joe Biden she looked at times like a caricature of Sarah Palin imitating Tina Fey imitating Sarah Palin.
To prejudge the effect of the leader debates here is a tricky business.
In America, the big set-piece debates in the final weeks before the election come after dozens of candidate debates of all shapes and sizes across ten unrelenting months of campaigning.
In Britain, we'll get everything dumped on us over the course of a very few weeks: the manifestos, the debates, the battle buses, the hustings, the media frenzy, the billboards, the party political broadcasts, all the twists and turns, shocks and surprises, all at once.
Barring a gaffe, a memorable phrase or, somehow, a window into Brown's or Cameron's or Clegg's soul, what we'll get from the leaders will be a series of policy mini-statements, focus-grouped promises, and scripted soundbites.
Indeed, the blandness of these stage-managed debates – in which the debaters will do very little real sparring with each other – may well suffer by comparison with the gladiatorial rough and tumble that Britons have come to expect from the House of Commons.
Or at least what a few Britons have come to expect.
The typical audience for prime minister's questions is miniscule compared to the number that the first of three leaders' debates is bound to get as a breakthrough political event.
Indeed, exposure is Gordon Brown's great pre-election gift to David Cameron and, more so, Nick Clegg.
I wonder if the prime minister would have consented to televised debates if the Labour Party, instead of trailing the Conservatives by 12 to14 points as it was last October when he said yes, had been closing the gap as it has been of late.
Could it be that Brown's act of green-lighting the debates was itself a gaffe? We'll have to watch to find out.
Stryker McGuire is a contributing editor at Newsweek; editor of LSE Research, a new magazine at the London School of Economics, and an associate at Lombard Street Research, an economics consultancy in the City of London.
