Eleven months ago, when the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that Washington University would host the vice presidential debate this year, it was a little like being awarded the ArenaBowl instead of the Super Bowl. Indoor football’s championship game is a nice event, but it ain’t the NFL.

My, how Sarah Palin has changed things.

Republican Sen. John McCain’s selection of the Alaska governor as his running mate changed the math, at least as far as St. Louis’ always fragile self-esteem is concerned. Tonight’s debate between Ms. Palin and Democratic Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware has become must-see TV. By some estimates, the television audience could exceed the 52.4 million who watched last Friday’s first presidential debate between Mr. McCain and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

Some 3,000 media credentials have been issued. The Hilltop Campus has been strung with miles of telecommunications cable and festooned with enough cops and cyclone fence to lock down a medium-security institution.

With due respect to his distinguished 35-year Senate career, Joe Biden is not the attraction. Joe Biden is about as exciting as the Rams. Joe Biden can’t get a front-page headline even when he puts Franklin Roosevelt in the White House four years early and on television when Philo T. Farnsworth still was working out the bugs.

No, Sarah Palin — her quirky resume, her stunning ascendance, her electrifying convention speech and her subsequent struggles to demonstrate fundamental competence and knowledge of the issues — is the reason for the fuss.

There are two ways this debate could go: One, it’s a train wreck, painful to watch, and Mr. McCain’s campaign will suffer blunt trauma. Two, Ms. Palin will rise to the occasion. She’s been cloistered with coaches and advisers all week; if she has crammed enough knowledge into her head and can summon it on command in semi-complete sentences, she may emerge unscathed.

And if she can do that under fire from Mr. Biden, it will be the greatest performance at a Washington University gymnasium since the one-legged American gymnast George Eyser won three golds medals at the 1904 Olympic Games.

But as long as the spectacle is in town, we’ll offer a little local color and some questions that the two candidates and moderator Gwen Ifill of PBS could address tonight:

• Unemployment numbers for August came out this week. More than 103,000 people in the 16-county St. Louis metropolitan region were out of work. That 7.2 percent rate is 1.1 percentage points higher than the national rate. Can we talk a little about jobs?
• We have a pretty low tax burden — 32nd among the 50 states, all taxes combined, and the 15th lowest business costs. So why does a Forbes magazine survey rank Missouri 30th in its list of desirable places to do business?
• Might education have something to do with it? We’re 42nd in what we pay our teachers and 37th among the percentage of college graduates in the work force.
• We’re proud of our agriculture industry — No. 2 in the number of farms — but a lot of rural Missourians are hurting. The average rural Missourian earns $10,000 a year less than the average urban Missourian. Can you explain why that should be?
• The state’s poverty rate rose from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 13 percent in 2007, and that was before the recession took hold. When is that trickle-down thing going to get here?
• Out of a population of 5.8 million, 729,000 Missourians don’t have health insurance; 150,000 of them are children. One of every 6.5 Missourians is enrolled in the food stamp program. Too many of us can’t afford to eat and definitely can’t afford to get sick. Got any thoughts on that?

Welcome to Missouri. It’s the Show-me state. And it’s show time.