ike all campaign events, tonight's debate affords the traveling press corps, the two political camps, and their assorted pilot fish another splendid opportunity to extend their parallel universe to new horizons.
To the untrained eye, these people look like the rest of us, but they're not. They exist in a world of deodorized buses and hotel bedspreads crafted from petroleum byproducts. By now, they haven't a clue if they're in Hamtramck or Hialeah. In a month, they will be hard-pressed to remember the names of their children.
The herd experience here shapes up to be pretty much the usual campaign hallucination. Aside from network poobahs and columnists, the grunt reporters and political staffs will observe a nifty slice of the city that runs from Logan Airport - a Blade Runner tableau on its best day - through the Ted Williams Tunnel under Boston Harbor, an engineering marvel but a tunnel nonetheless.
Then it's on to the Big Dig, our very own $14 billion game of ''Where's Waldo.'' For years, we thought it was good clean fun. Sure, there might be the odd no-show job. A few tons of copper wiring might disappear, but, hey, that's public works. James Michael Curley, our former mayor and signature rogue, pioneered the concept.
Bill Weld, our insouciant former governor, never worried too much about the project during his tenure. He resigned in 1997 to become ambassador to Mexico, but Jesse Helms had other ideas, and today Weld is practicing law in Manhattan. Still, his departure reminds us that a good run beats a bad stand, a strategy his successor, Paul Cellucci, now grasps.
It has been on Cellucci's watch that we have learned about those pesky cost overruns: $2 billion, $3 billion, but who's counting? Now it's a giant embarrassment, and John McCain is mad at us. It gets worse. Someone keeps changing the access roads in the Big Dig free-fire zone, so that people, cabdrivers included, often have no idea where they will end up when they take a run at Logan.
After the Big Dig, it's fairly easy sailing down the Southeast Expressway - assuming you have a police escort - to the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts, where tonight's debate will take place. This complex has the charm of a coastal battery and is both in the middle of nowhere and not far from the sites where the authorities have been digging for dead people allegedly murdered on orders from the mob brother of the university president.
Back to virtual Boston: There is nary a cobblestone in this take on the city. The political herd will see no Old State House, Old City Hall, Old North Church, Old West Church, or Old South Meeting House. (One of them had the one-if-by-land-two-if-by-sea thing in its steeple.) Forget Bulfinch, Cotton Mather, the Athenaeum. More important, say goodbye to the sweetbreads fricasee at Locke-Ober's or a silver bullet at the Ritz bar.
Never mind. Boston is sprucing itself up anyway. The folks at UMass have the most to gain, so they appear to have been preparing for a parade and a moon landing ever since George W. Bush agreed to debate here.
The Boston outside the political establishment - that is to say, most of the city - has a lot on its plate besides tonight's debate. For starters, it is already bursting with garden-variety tourists who power-walk the Freedom Trail and, unfathomably, still pose in front of the ''Cheers'' pub on Beacon Street.
These folks are on vacation. So what are the odds that they're going to care about, much less watch, the debate?
Then there are the dreaded leaf people, who come in force from New Jersey and beyond in search of the resplendent sugar maple. They are interested in trees, not issues. Finally, school is back. This means that thousands of college students are studying or not studying. Either way, they manifest modest debate frenzy.
Not to worry. Boston will watch the debate, and not because of its vaunted political bloodlines. Those have grown sclerotic over the years. Boston will tune in to the debate because it's a hockey town and we like to watch fights.
Whatever happens, expect the mob graveyard stuff to leaven everyone's debate copy. The media can't resist.
