We’re midway through the slate of election year debates and spin is taking center stage. Both the DNC and RNC sent out e-mails to their supporters during Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debates to urge them to vote early and often in on-line polls – even offering specific links – in an attempt to sway the punditocracy’s opinion of who won the debates. The spinners are being spun. Add to this the useless cattle call of professional partisans who mouth the party line regardless of what actually happens in a debate, and you realize that truth is on the endangered species list in this election.

Tonight, President Bush and Senator Kerry will face off in St. Louis for the second of their three debates. The town-hall format is an opportunity to cut through this spin cycle and rise above the talking points – which have become so stale and predictable that they are counterproductive – and instead focus on pressing issues of substance that have so far gone unmentioned. Among these are out-of-control government spending, the future composition of the Supreme Court, Mr. Kerry’s shifting stands on affirmative action and school choice, and the scandal festering around Rep. Tom DeLay and Bush campaign aide Ralph Reed.

Jobs and the economy rank closely behind terrorism among Americans’ top concerns, but there has been little debate about the dire straits of our government’s own economic house to date. In the past four years we’ve gone from the first surplus in recent memory to a $450 billion dollar annual deficit. Government spending is outpacing that of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Renegade Republican voices have begun to criticize this abandonment of the traditionally conservative goal of fiscal responsibility. In recent months, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, who was a Republican congressman, and businessman Peter Peterson, who was commerce secretary in the Nixon administration, have published books taking the Republican Congress and administration to task for allowing this to occur on their watch. But Democrats have been slow to pick up on this disaffection and make it a central cause of their campaign. This only reinforces perceptions that Democrats are even less serious about fiscal responsibility than Republicans.

Since the 1992 election, only two new Supreme Court justices have been named. The justices are aging, and the next president could get to fill as many as three Supreme Court vacancies – almost certainly tipping the court to one side of its delicate 5-4 centrist balance. The Republicans, for example, could finally have the power to overturn Roe v. Wade, as their platform has called for the past 20 years. The problem with this position is that only 19% of the American people support a constitutional ban on abortion – a number that has stayed steady in an annual Gallup Poll survey for decades. Likewise, the Democrats’ torpedoing of judicial nominees like Miguel Estrada leaves a lot to be answered for. The American people deserve to know what kind of people the candidates would appoint to the bench.

Two of the key cases that the Supreme Court heard during the past four years had to do with affirmative action and school choice. For all the steady branding of Senator Kerry as a “flip-flopper,” affirmative action and school-choice are two substantive areas where the Massachusetts Democrat once seemed to stake out reform positions to the right of the Democratic party-line but has since beaten a hasty retreat back to the confines of liberal orthodoxy. In a speech at the Yale Political Union in 1992, which I attended, Senator Kerry said “the truth is that affirmative action has kept America thinking in racial terms…Not only by legislation, but by administrative decree and court order, a vast and bewildering apparatus of affirmative action rules and guidelines has been constructed. And somewhere in that vast apparatus conjured up to fight racism there exists a reality of reverse discrimination, that actually engenders racism.”

Likewise, at a 1998 speech at Northeastern University, John Kerry aligned himself with supporters of school choice, saying “shame on us for not realizing that there are parents in this country who today support vouchers not because they are enamored with private schools but because they want a choice for their children.” In both these cases, the carefully chosen language indicated that these were well thought out policy stands of principle for Senator Kerry. But because the multicultural mafia and the teachers’ unions serve as gatekeepers in the primaries, backing a fundamental reform of affirmative action and an expansion of school choice is the third rail of Democratic politics. Mr. Bush has an opportunity to highlight these issues, and the result could be an illuminating debate about the constricting influence of special interests and what really constitutes progressive policies

Speaking of special interests, with the bipartisan House ethics committee rebuking Mr. DeLay twice in the past week, the drumbeats of reform may yet provide a meaningful backbeat to this election. This is an open issue of influence-peddling that has yet to be brought to the forefront of the campaign. Given the Republican control of Congress, it is relevant.

Beyond all the sludge and spin, there remains much substance to be debated during this last month of the campaign.