I watched some of it with my wife this time. If you really want to distill it down, use a transcript. Then start highlighting the mistakes and bullshit on both sides.

Brendan Loy:

The unseriousness is partly our, the voters', fault, because although we say we want "straight talk," and although we say we hate negativity and personal attacks, we tend to rebel against politicians who tell us unpleasant truths, and we tend to make decisions based on the trivialities that attack ads generally focus on.

But it's the politicians' fault, too (to say nothing of their political consultants), because they're catering to our worst impulses. Above all, what we need right now is leadership, which sometimes requires taking real political risks (not phony, stunt-like risks, a la McCain, but real risks, like telling voters things they don't want to hear) -- and there seems to be a total dearth of political leadership in this country right now, on both sides of the aisle. It isn't just that McCain and Obama are flawed candidates; it's that there aren't really any better alternatives. Who would you rather see up there? Hillary Clinton? Mitt Romney? John Edwards? Mike Huckabee? Joe Biden? Sarah Palin? Nancy Pelosi? John Boehner? Harry Reid? Mitch McConnell? George W. Bush? John Kerry? Dick Cheney? Al Gore? Please. Our political class is totally failing us, almost as much as we're failing ourselves.

There is a quote--attributed vaguely to many different people--along the lines of "a democracy will last until people discover they can vote themselves money out of the Treasury." This is pretty much all our government does right now, and I doubt it's going to get better under either party.