PACE YOURSELF.(Democratic candidates for president take part in debate hosted by Pace University)

For those not lucky enough to have tickets to last Thursday's Democratic debate at Pace University, downtown, the place to be was not the so-called spin room--a gigantic basement gymnasium hastily equipped to accommodate four hundred media reps bent on seeing Wesley Clark's debut. It was the Eddie Layton Student Union, one floor above, where about two hundred college and high-school students had gathered for a special meeting of the poli-sci class "Road to the White House," led by Professors Christopher Malone and George Martinez.

The televisions were big, the lights pleasantly dimmed, and the free food (hoagies, pasta salad, couscous) vastly superior. The students, many of them potential voters, presented the opportunity for an on-site focus group and--being young, impressionable, and habitually less cynical than the press gaggle downstairs--a more receptive audience for unannounced visits from the candidates.

Sure enough, forty-five minutes before the debate began, John Kerry came bounding in. He performed his standard group greeting--right hook morphing into outstretched wave. "We are going to talk today about how we put America back to work," he said. "This guy down in the White House, George Bush, is taking America in a radically wrong direction." Kerry spoke for ten minutes, about Bush's United Nations appearance (which displayed "an extraordinary, continued level of arrogance"), his own campaign promise to eradicate usable nukes from the American arsenal, and the need to reclaim "patriotism" from the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Tom DeLay.

Professor Martinez took a quick pre-game survey, and determined that the class was more or less equally familiar with John Edwards and Jay-Z. During the debate, Al Sharpton's good-natured quips ("I'm a different Al than you hung out with before, Joe, but I'm going to win") got the best response from the room. Dennis Kucinich's Keebler-elf visage brought chuckles at first, but as Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt traded accusations the students mostly kept their thoughts to themselves.

At six o'clock, when the debate was over, Martinez and Malone conducted a straw poll. Sharpton, owing perhaps to home-town favoritism, came out on top, with Clark edging Dean for second, and Kerry and Edwards rounding out the top five. Bob Graham received no votes. A discussion ensued. "I think that we would have liked to have heard some issues that were a little more pertinent to our demographic," one young man said. "But, at the same time, the economy is a little more important than drug laws and other things--lowering the drinking age, stuff ...