After the debate tonight, I’ll be looking to see what Imaginary Bubba thinks. He always gets it wrong, but he’s entertaining.

Imaginary Bubba lives in the heads of the punditocracy, and as soon as a debate is over, everyone on the news networks rushes forward to tell you what their Imaginary Bubba thought of what went down. They won’t tell you who they thought won the debate - as in “Which candidate came closer to convincing me that he’d be the better choice for President through his demeanor, policies, and truthfulness?” And they won’t immediately go to fact checking, like they used to. No no. They will tell you which candidate they think did better in the eyes of the American people. Because the pundits themselves don’t watch debates anymore - they let their Imaginary Bubba watch it for them.

And as I said, Imaginary Bubba doesn’t represent the American people as faithfully as his hosts think. In fact, Imaginary Bubba is wayyy out of touch with Joe Sixpack, which is odd, because they went to junior high together. But in the first three debates, Imaginary Bubba, largely, called it a tie. A slight McCain advantage in the first, maybe.

What made this all the more startling is that the pundits ignored actual Bubbas in favor of their imaginary ones. On all three debate nights, polls instantly came back saying that the overwhelming winners were Obama, Biden, and Obama. The talking heads barely paid those polls any heed, because they were listening to a higher authority - the rib-eatin’, shit-kickin’, family-values mainstream American that they’ve spent years constructing inside their savvy media skulls.

Of course, all three times, those polls turned out to be right, an accurate reflection of how the debates were perceived, and Imaginary Bubba turned out to be wrong. You’d think that this would tell our friends on the TV something, that maybe they should start analyzing with their own brains rather than with the brains of the mythical fantasy redneck they’ve built in their heads. But I guess that’s the one thing that Imaginary Bubba has in common with real Bubbas. He’s damned stubborn.