Watching the candidates arrive at the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas was a reminder of how debased the political process has become since Mailer’s time. If you’ve never seen the Nixon-Kennedy debates you’ll be surprised not by Nixon’s five-o’clock shadow but the detailed, substantial and sound-bite free answers of both candidates. Watching this gang of hopefuls try to hit the right notes, without saying anything that could be offensive to anyone, was like watching Wolf Blitzer try to herd cats.

After a cheesy advance job that treated the debate like a sporting event (with all the commentators agreeing that Hillary had to get tough) the leading lady came out with some scripted gag about her pantsuit being asbestos. Then she was asked about her iinability to give a straight answer to almost any question (the “politics of parsing”), and answered with bland boilerplate about the American people. Everyone talks about the American people as if they were a coherent mass, one that tunes into CNN when they could be watching House or reruns of Mad Men.

“The American people don’t give a darn about any of this stuff,” Joe Biden declared. Jobs, drug dealers in the hood, soldiers in Iraq — these are the sorts of things Americans are worrying about. Chris Dodd said “There is a shrillness to the debate,” though I found it more fuzzy than shrill.

There were a few surprises. Bill Richardson, when speaking of the looming energy crisis, actually mentioned those American people making sacrfices. And Dennis Kucinich sometimes sounds like the sanest person in the room, as when he said he voted against the Patriot Act “because I read it.” (And yes, he has the hottest wife too.)

But it was mostly a bloodless affair. Hillary Clinton is the kind of person who talks about being excited without ever actually seeming that way. The curse of the front runner, the presumptive candidate, is that she cannot risk seeming too lifelike. No one needs to worry about their make-up anymore. Everyone looks fine, if fainter despite all the color.