The media have taken a lot of criticism recently for overusing boxing and fighting metaphors to describe the campaign, encouraging the candidates to “take the gloves off” and that sort of thing. (Chris Matthews is particularly bad about it.) Not that this excuses the overuse of the cliché, but the main reason political journalists enjoy it when candidates “fight” each other like they did tonight is that modern political campaigns are highly scripted and deadly boring. The best lines in the fights are often just as premeditated, but at least the fights themselves offer a simulacrum of spontaneity. Did Hillary and Barack come into tonight’s debate prepared to accuse each other of being, respectively, a corporate sell-out and a slum-lord’s hired gun? Probably. But it was still fun to watch:

Here the candidates get bogged down in a convoluted argument about the arcana of each others’ voting records (Hillary gets booed about halfway through the clip). The narrowing of the Democratic field down to three senators who have cast hundreds of votes made this kind of petty bickering inevitable:

I don’t mean to say that the candidates are only interesting to watch when they’re fighting. Occasionally they do say something that’s both substantive and unexpected, and we’re eventually able to get a sense of who they are through the accumulation of such moments. But, fair or unfair, the fights are interesting too.