#1 - It will be a waste of time. George will ask all the inside-baseball questions that he loves, leading off with "when you said 'bitter' did you mean 'bitter' or 'bitter-bitter'"? Hillary, "How do you respond to that?". zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz George doesn't have any good Iran questions, so he'll probably go with a trade-related question.
#2 - Charles Gibson will ask each candidate to talk about the other candidate, so he doesn't have to ask hard questions himself, risking appearing a bully or a badger (for some reason, viewers expect our "anchors" to be warm-fuzzies, mostly).
#3 - The candidates will get by with their stump speeches, mostly, still. "3 a.m." will be the o'clock all night. We'll hear about "Washington" being out of touch and "Day one" (which is so overused, it's now like The Longest Day). We may hear about guns. We'll hear about some abstract thing called "growing the economy". We may hear about Rev Wright, but not about race-relations in general or the courthouse.
- We won't hear about abortion, most likely.
- We won't hear about whether we have a revenue problem in the budget that we cannot just "grow out of" (McCain should be asked about that, given his wide-eyed view of tax cuts).
- We won't hear specific proposals or timeframes or sacrifices for changing the energy-mix in the United States, other than "green jobs" galore, somehow.
- We won't hear about the vexing problems on nuclear proliferation, including the demand for peaceful nuclear energy, the world over.
- We won't hear about torture and prosecuting the Bush Administration and their vision of the CIA in combating terrorism/global counter-insurgency.
- We won't hear about increased military spending (or our space war policies).
- We won't hear anything but passing comments about Afghanistan, the forgotten and slipping-away stabilization.
- We won't hear about homeland security (or homeland security pork spending) or bird-flu or a new 'war on cancer'.
