A lady named Lisa Kee stood up and asked, "How will your tax proposals affect me as a middle-class, 34-year-old single person with no dependents?"

So Gore told how his proposal would affect her, and then it was Bush's turn. He said Gore's plan would cost a whole lot of money -- "a lot more than we have."

He then explained: "I think also what you need to think about is not the immediate, but what about Medicare? You get a plan that will include prescription drugs, a plan that will give you options. Now, I hope people understand that Medicare today is important, but it doesn't keep up with the new medicines. If you're a Medicare person, on Medicare, you don't get the new procedures. You're stuck in a time warp in many ways.

Tuesday night's debate gave us the real Al Gore and the real George W. Bush. Gore won -- he may even have killed -- but he's still annoying. One can only conclude that that smarmy, pietistic streak of his is absolutely authentic; that's exactly who he really is.

He's sharp as a razor, knows his onions (does anyone else outside of Congress know what "Dingell-Norwood" is?) and will probably be a good president. Bush not only amply demonstrated his vast ignorance but also was so profoundly misleading on his supposed role in the Texas Patients' Bill of Rights that I have to conclude he knowingly lied.

It's possible to not know or be confused about a lot of things, but Bush cannot possibly believe what he said: "As a matter of fact, I brought Republicans and Democrats together to do just that in the state of Texas, to get a patients' bill of rights through." He was there, I was there, and that's flat untrue. He reviewed the details of the bill accurately, so it was clear that he had recently prepped on the subject.

The ever-thrilling topic of military spending is our text du jour. We seem to have two categories of comment about our candidates on the issues. The first is that there's not a dime's worth of difference between them, and the second is that they are separated by great yawning gulfs of difference and that the fate of the nation hangs in the balance. Well, on the military, there are differences, but not enough.

George W. Bush wants to spend more on the military, and Al Gore wants to spend even more than that. The problem is that's not the problem. The problem is that we spend money on the military stupidly, and this in turn affects everything else, because this election is about choices and priorities.

More for the military means less for education, child care, health care and all the rest; the military is still the biggest ticket item in "discretionary" spending.

If you're in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois or Missouri, the presidential race is high-tension and inescapable. The continuous blat from the air wars -- the television and radio advertising campaigns -- is everywhere. More money is being spent on this presidential election than ever before, but it's being spent in fewer than a dozen states, so the concentrated effect is practically stunning.

When we decide that yesterday's breakthrough purchase has become today's outmoded albatross, we may gripe about the hassle and expense of upgrading to new systems. Sometimes, no doubt, we buy more for reasons of consumer vanity than practical functionality.

But the common determination to keep up with the (Digital) Joneses isn't mere status-seeking. As the Internet continues to gain momentum, we're apt to believe -- for good reasons -- that we must not be left behind. In professional and financial realms, those who lack access to the latest in techno-communication are likely to find themselves at a distinct disadvantage.