In this video from 23/6, we can exactly how little valuable dialogue arose from the three presidential debates:

Funny thing: I don’t exactly blame the candidates for becoming sad little broken records in this reductio ad absurdum. I blame the media for asking the same questions over and over in different words, and for shying away from any unique discourse. I blame campaigns and parties for having very specific expectations of how a debate must run.  I blame the culture of presidential campaigning, which states that a debate must always begin with a cutesy thanking-of-the-moderator, must always contain cutesy personal stories, and must always focus on the very few issues assumed to be “key”. I even have a little blame reserved for of every one of us who watched the debates, found them totally unsatisfying, and just numbly waited around for the next installment.

It’s a sad state of affairs, but everyone is complicit in it.

Even the most ardent partisans I know, on either side, found the debates to be entirely dull. When your debates put a passionate political science professor to sleep (which happened to one of mine), something is tragically wrong.
 
Maybe someday, bloggers and other members of the “new media” will have the power to influence political campaigns, and push for more interesting, unstilted discussion. The YouTube debates from earlier this year demonstrated some promise for the future, I think. But with debates like the last three, we still have a long way to go.