I have covered a dozen national political conventions and now five presidential debates, so I suppose I could have played it blase as I waited for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to start the Hullabaloo in Hempstead. But who would I be kidding? Not the Radio Vietnam reporter sitting to my right. Not the Serbian television commentator next to him, nor the three guys from a weekly neighborhood newspaper to my left. And certainly not the hundreds of young reporters and students immersed in such a mega-event for the first time.
I'd only be kidding myself. I was pumped. I also was nervous.
As a debate that could decide the presidency — certainly one that could end a presidency if Obama put in another paltry performance — this was as tense a moment as you'll ever get in the civic life of our country.
And it was happening a half-mile from my office and about eight miles from where I grew up on Long Island. Why be old-pro cool about that — especially when this was a chance for my Nassau County neighbors to shine as surrogates for suburban swing voters everywhere and shake up a presidential campaign?
For one night, journalism and politics had converged on the Hofstra University campus, much as their trailers and satellite trucks already are massed in Boca Raton for Monday night's final debate. Thousands of media and political professionals came from everywhere imaginable, and as the clock ticked down to the 9 p.m. start time, most of us took up positions inside the vast Hofstra field house, a short fly ball from the arena where Obama and Romney would duke it out.
We weren't in the room with the candidates or the 82 Nassau residents picked to ask them questions. Only a handful of reporters got that close. The rest of us were like the fans who buy a ticket to a theater to watch a heavyweight championship fight. It's not the same as being there, but it's also different from watching at home. It's a much more tribal experience with an emotional synergy, an electrical tension, that connects everyone in the room.
Until, at least, the fight turns out to be a mismatch and evening fizzles and everyone boos for their money back.
Not this night. This was the debate that didn't disappoint, the confrontation that lived up to expectations.
You've already read and seen plenty about how much sharper were the exchanges compared to the first debate and how much stronger was Obama's performance. His energetic, more in-your-face challenges and defenses did no less than save his campaign to fight another day.
But what was most important — and most personal to me — was the way the nation got to hear from the moderate "swing" voters who have decided the last six presidential elections and will decide this one as well. They were suburbanites — literally my neighbors — and they had a chance to show that their communities are feeling just as much, and maybe more, pain as the rest of the country.
Jeremy Epstein, the college student who asked the first question, could have been my kid — Lawn Guyland accent and all. He wanted assurances for himself and his parents that he could get a job when he graduates.
One of my own sons, who recently earned his diploma from a top state school, is living at home. Another, who recently left military service, is attending college on the GI Bill. Neither of them has been able to find a job that comes close to paying all their bills — when they can find work at all.
The questions and answers about high gas prices, immigration, small business, education and, of course, jobs, jobs, jobs could not have resonated more than they did in suburbia, despite its stereotypes of prosperity and homogeneity.
These are not my mother and father's suburbs, I'm fond of saying. The pace of change is so dramatic — demographic, social, economic — that it's fair to say these are not even my now adult children's suburbs.
In the most recent National Suburban Poll, which I oversaw for the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra, more than 40 percent of the respondents reported living paycheck to paycheck. We know that many suburbs are seeing signs of urban dysfunction and decay. Even as growing racial and ethnic minorities are bringing new energy and wealth to lagging neighborhoods, and literally changing the face of this and other suburbs, they also are stressing schools and other governmental, civic and social institutions with new, often different, needs.
The debate itself was held on the edge of one of the poorest suburban communities in the state. Many of the roads and sewers that spurred development in the 1950s and 1960s, the dawn of the suburban era that brought my parents from New York City, are obsolete and in desperate need of repair or replacement.
Unfortunately, there is far less help available from Washington and Albany to revitalize suburban communities that can't afford to do so on their own. The suburbs suffer from myths and stereotypes that have endured despite being inaccurate for a generation.
The irony is that suburbanites on Long Island, outside Albany and other cities in New York, will not cast a meaningful vote in the presidential election. We are a "blue" state and the Democrat will win, just as no rancher in Wyoming will affect the outcome in the "red" state that the GOP will win. The suburbanites who will count live in the six to eight states still truly up for grabs. They will get the most intense focus down the stretch.
But last Tuesday, Long Islanders stood up for all suburbanites for 90 anxious minutes followed across the country and beyond it. If the answers weren't always clear and convincing, the pleas for understanding were — even if they came in that funky accent that only a Long Islander could love.
Lawrence C. Levy is executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. His email address is lawrence.levy@hofstra.edu.