Hopefully, one of the tougher things I’ll be facing over the next eight to ten months is the job of watching Republican debates. It’s the kind of thing a judge might sentence you to in lieu of community service. The clown car is emptying out in Iowa tonight for a 9pm (Eastern) demonstration of collective insanity. Texas Governor Rick Perry won’t be there. His plan is to step on the Ames Straw Poll by announcing his candidacy the same day. This should have the effect of killing any hope the lesser candidates might have of getting a boost either from the debate tonight or from a victory in Ames on Saturday.

Because Rick Perry’s imminent announcement hovers over tonight’s debate, there is a certain anachronistic quality to it, even though it has not yet even occurred. TPMDC (cited above) does a good job of running down what you should be watching for, but I’ll just add a little bit to what they’ve said. Mitt Romney is still solidly entrenched as the frontrunner in the polls but he isn’t making any serious effort to win the Ames Straw Poll, nor to win the Iowa Caucuses in December or January. He assumes, probably correctly, that Iowa’s Republican base is way too evangelical to make a Mormon their standard bearer. But that doesn’t mean he can’t win tonight’s debate. Tonight will be the debating debut for former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who is a more moderate (and consistent) version of Romney. He, too, is not seriously contesting for Iowa’s delegates, but he’ll need to make a strong first impression. There can be only one moderate Mormon in the race, so Huntsman’s job is to supplant Romney as the “electable” establishment choice before the voters start going to the polls. How will Huntsman go about doing that? Will he be stridently negative towards Romney? Or will he try to be a more reasonable and less flip-floppy alternative to him?

Another thing to keep an eye out for is how former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty will handle the humiliation of seeing himself upstaged by backbencher Michele Bachmann. In the last debate, Pawlenty emasculated himself by failing to say to Romney’s face what he’d been saying to the press in the days leading up to the debate. His campaign barely has a pulse, and he’s going to have to make some news.

As for the rest of the candidates, you can rely on Ron Paul, Herman Cain, and Rick Santorum to say some strange things. The only suspense is in waiting to see what those strange things are. For example, Santorum made news this week by holding up a napkin and telling the assembled people the following:

“I can call this napkin a paper towel,” Santorum told a crowd of roughly 40 people “But it is a napkin. And why? Because it is what it is. Right? You can call it whatever you want, but it doesn’t change the character of what it is. So when people come out and say that marriage is something else – marriage is the marriage of 5 people – 5, 10, 20. Marriage can be between fathers and daughters. Marriage can be between any two people, any four people, any 10 people, it can be any kind of relationship and we can call it marriage. But it doesn’t make it marriage. Why? Because there are certain qualities and certain things that attach to the definition of what marriage is.”

This can be roughly translated to, “Gay people are paper towels; straight people are napkins.” If we’re lucky, we’ll get something even better from him tonight.