What if they held a presidential debate and hardly anyone watched?
That could be the case in the Philadelphia area tonight as the third and final meeting between Barack Obama and John McCain goes head-to-head with the Phillies' attempt to win a spot in the World Series.
Viewers who opt for politics over baseball will get to see whether Republican McCain, still lagging in the polls, can find a way to launch a comeback with just 20 days left before the election.
To take advantage of what may be his last chance to shake things up, McCain will have to perform better than he has in the previous debates. According to the polls, he lost both to Democrat Obama, whom many voters saw as the steadier and calmer candidate.
"The distinction could not be clearer: One guy [Obama] is fighting for you, and the other guy is fighting mad," Obama's running mate, Joe Biden, told a crowd yesterday in Warren, Ohio.
McCain gave a debate preview of his own in Blue Bell, Montgomery County, saying of Obama: "Perhaps never before in history have the American people been asked to risk so much based on so little."
Tonight's subject is domestic issues; the host is Bob Schieffer of CBS News; the site is Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y.
The format is similar to that of the first debate Sept. 26. The moderator asks a question and gives each candidate two minutes to answer, followed by five minutes of conversation.
This time, the candidates will sit together at a small table rather than stand at separate lecterns. Such proximity is likely to encourage more direct engagement between the two; in the first debate, McCain barely looked at Obama.
With the stock market down 16 percent since the first debate, the focus is sure to be on the economy and the plans laid out by the candidates this week.
What remains uncertain is whether McCain will pursue the character issues about Obama - including the Illinois senator's association with William Ayers, a leader of the violent, radical Weather Underground of the 1960s and 1970s - that the Republican candidate has raised in commercials and speeches but not in the debates.
Last week, after the second debate, Obama said in a television interview that he had been surprised that McCain had not been willing to raise the matter "to my face."
Yesterday, in an interview with KMOX radio in St. Louis, McCain said he had been "astonished" to hear Obama say "that I didn't have the guts" to talk about Ayers.
