There is a major political debate currently happening in many parts of this country, but the astonishing thing is that most politicians -- especially those on the national stage -- seem to want to pretend the debate doesn't even exist. We saw this previously on the issue of gay marriage, when even the Democratic candidates for president in 2008 wouldn't support the idea for fear of losing votes -- even though it was obviously the right thing to do. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would only support half-measures whose time had already passed, saying they were in favor of "civil unions," but that "marriage" was too sacred a word to use for these unions. That was only eight years ago, and the political shift since then has been monumental. These days, it would be hard for any Democrat to get elected who didn't wholeheartedly support marriage equality for all. The people led, and the leaders eventually followed.

The next issue where this is already happening is marijuana legal reform. The arc of history is clear, and it is bending in one obvious direction. But politicians from Hillary Clinton on down refuse to show more than lukewarm support for half-measures which are already outdated. This is nothing short of political cowardice. Hillary Clinton is a special case, because her husband was the first United States president to admit smoking marijuana, although even this admission was hedged in lawyerly fudging ("I didn't inhale"). But that was almost 25 years ago, and in the meantime public opinion has shifted dramatically.

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Tonight, the candidates for vice president will debate. Now, the vice-presidential debate is truly the Rodney Dangerfield of political events. Don't believe me? Here an the actual headline I read in my morning newspaper today: "Oh, There's A Vice Presidential Debate, Too." It don't get no respect, I tells ya... no respect.

I find that even I am not sufficiently excited about this event (which is another way of saying to my readers: "I won't be after-blogging tonight"). The two campaigns have made it pretty impossible to get excited about the vice-presidential debate, by dint of their choices for vice-presidential candidates. Mike Pence? Tim Kaine? Really? That's who you picked? Excuse me while I yawn enormously....

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It's time to take a look at the presidential race once again, and I have to begin with a program note. Up until now, I've been writing these columns every two weeks, but from now until the election, they'll appear each Monday like clockwork, since the race is about to head into the homestretch.

In the past two weeks, the presidential race has certainly had some ups and downs. Hillary Clinton saw the end of her slide in the polls, and the beginning of the bounce she earned by her first debate performance. Donald Trump has seen his numbers fall, which is likely only going to get worse as the impact of his unusual debate performance (and everything that happened in the week thereafter) begins to be reflected in more and more state polls.

The overall chart of the race for Electoral Votes (EV) looks better for Clinton than last time around, but I would caution that this chart doesn't show the underlying strengths (which we'll get to in a moment). As always, Clinton (blue) starts from the bottom, Trump (red) starts from the top, and whichever line crosses the middle (the 270 EV needed to win) would win the election if it were held today and all the polling was accurate.

[Click on any of theses images to see larger-scale versions.]

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Our subtitle today is not original, so we've got to start by giving credit where credit is due. David French, a writer for the ultraconservative National Review (and a man once so horrified by Donald Trump's candidacy that he considered running himself), had the funniest metaphor for Trump's performance in Monday's first presidential debate:

After the first 20 minutes, it may have been the most lopsided debate I've ever seen -- and not because Clinton was particularly effective. But you don't need to be good when your opponent is bad. Why didn't he have a better answer ready for the birther nonsense? Has he still not done any homework on foreign policy? I felt like I was watching the political Titanic hit the iceberg, back up, and hit it again. Just for fun.

The extraordinary thing about this is not that a conservative is ridiculing a debate performance of the Republican candidate for president, since he's not the only one who did so this week (more on this in the talking points), and also since the list of Republicans who support Hillary Clinton is growing by the day. No, the extraordinary thing is that the author wrote this before Trump started actually fighting back against former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. French was just talking about the debate itself, but for the entire rest of the week, Trump backed his personal Titanic up again and again, and tried to just ram through the iceberg, over and over. He was even up early this morning, providing yet another day's legs for this story.

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With only about four months left to go in his second term in office, President Barack Obama just had his first veto overturned by Congress. Considering Obama's rather aloof attitude towards Congress (including even members of his own party), what is extraordinary isn't so much that Obama just got overturned -- it's that it hasn't happened before now. The contentiousness between the White House and the Capitol has been pretty fierce during Obama's term, but up until this week none of his vetoes has been overturned.

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There has been relatively little speculation this election year about what could possibly be the "October surprise." In a normal presidential election year, this is a fun subject to speculate about when the actual news from the campaign trail gets dull and repetitive. This year, of course, that hasn't exactly happened -- the political news has been anything but dull and repetitive, in fact. Because of this, most political reporters haven't even bothered to wonder if an October surprise will happen, much less what it might consist of. The few articles I've seen have suggested two possibilities: Wikileaks releasing more of Hillary Clinton's emails, and Vladimir Putin launching some military adventurism somewhere in the world. Both, it's interesting to note, would aid Donald Trump's candidacy. Perhaps one or the other of these will happen, but I think there's a different October surprise out there, and one which (depending on the outcome) might help Clinton, not Trump.

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As startling as it is to those of us who obsess over politics, last night's presidential debate was actually the first time millions of Americans paid any attention whatsoever to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. For millions, the first debate is the first time they tune in at all, both literally and figuratively. Even more astonishing, most of them haven't made up their minds on which candidate to support, even this late in the race.

This is astonishing but it really shouldn't be, because it happens pretty much every election cycle. Our presidents are not really chosen by the 40 percent who are staunchly Republican or the 40 percent who are loyal Democrats -- it is always decided by the 20 percent in the middle.

This year, the undecideds have already made their presence known, mostly by their absence. We have two third-party candidates in the race who are polling much higher than third-party candidates usually do. Gary Johnson regularly gets around eight or nine percent, and Jill Stein has been getting three to four percent as well. What this has meant is that the two major candidates are battling it out in the low 40s. If there were no big third-party draw, those numbers would be in the high 40s or even low 50s. So the effect is already noticeable.

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Well, the first presidential debate is a done deal, and as always I like to quickly type out my own personal reactions before reading everyone else's, to give you an opinion uninfluenced by the herd mentality of the rest of the media.

Because of this, I apologize in advance for any misquotes, since I am only using my hastily-scratched notes for what the candidates said. Each has at least the flavor of whatever the word-for-word transcript will say, but I may miss nuances of phrasing. Just to get that caveat out of the way... but enough of this debate prep (as it were), let's get right on to the debate itself.

Overall reactions

Did Lester Holt just leave the stage for large chunks of time during the debate? I mean, the cameras weren't on him, so he could easily have stepped out for a bite to eat or something. The absence of Holt, and his downright inability to take any sort of control of the debate, was noticeable, to put it mildly. We can argue about who won the debate, but Lester Holt definitely lost the debate, that's for sure.

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This past week, normal Americans went about their daily lives. Children endured school once again, the birds twittered merrily, and lovers everywhere fell in love. Life went on for hundreds of millions. Lucky them.

In the world of wonkcraft, though, political observers everywhere are caught in a waiting game, ticking off the moments until the first presidential debate (which happens this Monday night -- which you probably already knew, if you're reading this sort of article). What will happen? Will Donald Trump melt down? Will he strain his "presidential" muscle? Will he storm off the stage in a tantrum, halfway through? Will Hillary Clinton make it through the evening without stumbling (either metaphorically or physically, one might add)? Will Lester Holt redeem NBC News after the fiasco named Matt Lauer? Will Trump reference body parts (his own, his opponent's, or perhaps even the moderator's)? It's certainly happened before.

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Are the presidential debates a valuable tool for voters to become informed about the candidates, or have they morphed into something which has no real bearing on how anyone would perform the job of president? That was the provocative subject of a Washington Post opinion piece today, and the author mostly came down on the side of the debates having outlived their usefulness.

One main point the author made was that debates are now more entertainment than an exploration of political policy, and more about who has the better comedic timing than how either of them would do the job they're running for. That's all true to a certain extent -- nobody's expecting the spirit of Lincoln/Douglas to appear on the stage next Monday night (this would still be true even if Donald Trump weren't one of the debaters, it's worth pointing out). Modern televised debates are different, and might be more akin to a Roman gladiator battle than Abraham Lincoln discussing slavery with his opponent. The first televised debates ever aired, back in the 1960s and 1970s, might have been a little closer to formal debates (such as those you might see at a high school or college debating team competition), but they have now indisputably changed into a contest to see who can utter the most clever soundbite -- one that will then be replayed endlessly over the networks for the next few weeks.

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