Turn the debate into fight night

So that other debate is on TV tomorrow night.

You know, the one between those two guys running for president? What are their names again? The black guy and the old guy? Oh, yeah, Barack Obama and John McCain.

Funny, you don't seem that excited.

In fact, did I hear ... snoring?

Oh, sure, it's no Joe Biden vs. Sarah Palin, which was the Thrilla in Manilla of recent political debates.

Watching that one and then sitting through Obama-McCain II could be like seeing The Godfather followed by an infomercial on vacuum cleaners.

But that's what hype can do for a debate. And the Biden-Palin debate generated so much hype because the entire country wanted to see if Governor Palin could actually speak in complete sentences and correctly point to Russia on a map.

Would the aw-shucks hockey mom get it together and display more knowledge of the issues than she did in her disastrous conversations with Katie Couric, now known as the Hindenburg of all TV interviews?

People wanted to know, so more than 70 million of them tuned into the vice-presidential debate between Biden and Palin.

In fact, it was the second most-watched political debate since they started keeping track of these things, topped only by the Ronald Reagan-Jimmy Carter face-off in 1980.

And the Biden-Palin debate attracted almost 20 million more viewers than the first Obama-McCain debate.

Boy, did little old Baltimore eat it up, too.

According to the Nielsen ratings, Baltimore had the highest percentage of viewers (59.1) in the whole country tuned in to the VP debate.

Hey, it's nice to be No. 1 at something besides venereal diseases and unsolved shootings.

Look, even the Saturday Night Live sketches about the first Obama-McCain debate were boring - especially compared to this past weekend's hilarious send-up of the Biden-Palin dust-up, complete with Queen Latifah playing the role of book-hawking moderator Gwen Ifill.

Oh, people will be talking about this one for days. Tina Fey is so dead-on with her impersonation of Palin - with the winks, the accent, the mangled syntax, the Stepford Wives-smile - that she actually seems to morph into the Alaska governor each Saturday night at 11:30.

And Jason Sudeikis was exceptional as the slick, verbose, hair-plugged Biden, touting his middle-class cred by stressing that he grew up in the depressed hellhole of Scranton, Pa., and adding cheerfully "Wilmington, Del., isn't much better!"