You know the presidential debates may have started too early when enough candidates show up for the first pair of them to field two baseball teams. The contenders, eight Democrats and 10 Republicans, took the stages for the first time even before all the cherry petals had blown out of Washington this spring. Eighteen more months will pass before one of them — or maybe someone else — is elected president. And in each month between July and December, at least one party’s candidates plan to gather, creating by far the longest presidential debate season ever.

In general, the formats will be all too familiar: The wannabes will wear power suits and stand behind podiums. A moderator will ask them questions. The studio audiences will applaud as if on cue. And the most important people in the room — the television camera crews — will record every sigh, nasty look or misspoken phrase. The effect will be so overproduced that the audience might expect to see the candidates’ speechwriters listed in the closing credits.

Will a nation with the collective attention span of a preschooler, and already distracted by an unpopular war, possibly pay attention? It might if the debates come packaged the way a kid might enjoy — as a video game. And a few Internet companies have come close, proposing to mix things up this debate season.

Slate, Yahoo! and The Huffington Post are collaborating on staging a presidential debate for each party soon after Labor Day, to be broadcast live — but only on their Web sites. Organizers say voters will have the opportunity to pose their own questions to the candidates, although the host, PBS’s Charlie Rose, will be able to weed out obscene and rude queries. Candidates with any animus toward their rivals won’t have to be in the same room with those opponents. They won’t have to be in their lucky blue suits or even in the same time zone, either, because they’ll be “together” only through the magic of Web conferencing tools. Some features under discussion are having pundits blog simultaneously in real time and polling viewers about who they think is “winning” even while the debate is under way.

“Web video has taken on such a huge role in American culture,” explained David Plotz, the acting editor of Slate. “When we look at things on the Web, we understand them differently than watching on TV or listening to the radio.”

Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post, says it will be essential for the 2008 candidates to foster a connection with the online public because the Internet is such an immediate and personal mode of communication. “While we firmly believe this debate will be substantive and bring in the voices and stories of people actually being affected by the issues and problems facing our country, I don’t think there is any way to escape the media and the public trying to figure out who ‘won’ and who ‘lost’,” she said, adding: “Stagecraft is an unavoidable part of modern politics.” In other words, instead of pretending they are above that handicapping, the three new media organizations are going to serve as the conduits for voters to declare which candidates had the most persuasive performances.

In future campaigns, when even more of the nation will be consuming even more of its news online, expect all debates to be simulcast on the Web. “This is the year to test the theory that the move to the Web will attract higher numbers,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.

This raises the question: Is it the medium or the message that matters in presidential debates?

It’s been almost half a century since John F. Kennedy mastered television and made TV a must-master medium, by wearing a little makeup and limiting the sweat on his brow when debating Richard M. Nixon, who may have lost the presidency in 1960 because he looked like he needed a shave and shower.

While TV has allowed politicians to control their messages, the Internet now offers the voters a way to democratize political coverage.

Expect the coming wave of presidential debates to provide fodder for the growing throng of amateur videographers to such sites as YouTube.com and Blip.tv. A bipartisan coalition of technology pioneers — including Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, and Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia — political groups, bloggers and others has petitioned the national Republican and Democratic parties seeking unfettered access to video of the debates. Instead of the clips becoming the copyrighted property of the networks that host the debates, these petitioners say the video should be in the public domain right away. There, average citizens will be free to mash the clips up into their own political messages.

“Anything that democratizes politics is a good thing,” said Mike Krempasky, co-founder of RedState.com, the conservative Web site, and one of the signatories. “For far, far, far too long politics and elections have been controlled by far too few people.”

The parties haven’t responded yet, but they may heed the call. Anything, they may decide, to spice up the longest debate season ever.

Contributing editor Elizabeth Wasserman is a Washington freelance writer. She can be reached at ewasserman@cq.com.