The six Republican presidential candidates have held two debates in the last seven days. The first, last Thursday in Manchester, N.H., wasn’t so much as debate as a get-acquainted mixer. The second, Monday in Phoenix, had a touch of confrontation to it, but a touch cushioned by velvet gloves.

It’s nice to see competitors in any field of endeavor treat each other with respect — the NBA should try it sometime. It would be even nicer to think that six competitors for their party’s presidential nomination could conduct themselves during the coming half-year primary season with the civility and good humor they’ve shown so far, with their differences in philosophy and policy gradually and thoughtfully revealed for the enlightenment of the voting public.

It would be nicer still if that chances of that were somewhat larger than slim and greater than none.

If history is any guide, the odds are what will happen is this: the polite, “phony” campaign will end the day the real shooting starts, the day face-to-face meetings give way to campaign commercials. Once the ad agency spin takes over, the gloves come off. Unfortunately, the candidates are no longer in the same ring. If the ability of a president to stand firm while under attack, to be strong in the face of adversity, truly matter, voters will just have to take each candidate’s word for it. In 30-second choreographed and scripted sound bites.

This is hardly a problem exclusive to Republicans; it just happens to be their problem this year because they have in Gov. George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain, two leading candidates trying to overcome reputations for temper and in Sen. Orin Hatch, Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes, four longshots, each trying to match up favorably with the top two. The departure of Pat Buchanan with no regrets expressed by party leadership clearly demonstrates that the GOP’s big tent has no room for loose cannons this year.

The Democrats, already getting pretty fiesty, have the opposite problem. With only two candidates it would be absurd for Vice President Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley to pretend they’re one big happy family. They both have reputations of being rather soft and squishy to overcome. They both want to prove they’re tough enough.

The fundamental problem, consistent from one election to the next, for presidential, congressional and, increasingly, statewide campaigns is that debates are considered the appetizer. The ability of candidates to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and answer questions, whether posed by the press, the public, policy experts or each other, is seen as a warm-up to the battle of the commercials. And increasingly the few debates that do occur before the general election are so laden with ground rules limiting the candidates’ direct access to each other that they might as well be commercials.

There is a proposal out there to encourage more direct contact between candidates. The Alliance for Better Campaigns is asking broadcasters to donate, on a strictly voluntary basis, five minutes per night in the the month before the election to issues-oriented coverage. Part of the idea is that once candidates grow comfortable doing solo five-minute spots without the ad man’s sheen, they’ll come to see debates as more the rule than the exception.

The proposal is, however, off to a slow start. And not because broadcasters are being uncooperative — the alliance reports that it is the candidates who are the most reluctant to perform without a script. Change will come, but it will slow; undoubtably too slow to have much effect this time around. So it’s sad to think that, when the November 2000 election rolls around, the most enlightening moments of the campaign occured back in December 1999.