Kaine and Pence duked it out, but they probably didn’t change any minds

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This is how the invective-and-insult campaign of the two presidential candidates has contaminated American politics: Two of the dullest, most dutiful public figures in the United States – piously religious men with the air of rural town-hall clerks – spent 90 minutes in the vice-presidential debate hectoring each other, demeaning the other's presidential nominee, shouting over each other, and displaying a colourful assortment of facial gestures that no Grade 3 teacher would tolerate for long.

Tuesday night's collision between Republican Governor Mike Pence, 57, of Indiana, and Democratic Senator Tim Kaine, 58, of Virginia, was expected to provide 90 minutes of relief to weary voters from coast to coast and across the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico.

Indeed, the running mates' debate was billed as a session that would be so drab, so unmemorable, so ineffably earnest that an entire country – exhausted by an endless presidential campaign, impatient with two unappealing presidential nominees, exasperated by charge and counter-charge about absent tax returns and missing e-mails, oversexed spouses and overweight beauty queens – would breathe a small sigh of relief.

Instead the country found itself saying, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan's famous riposte from his 1980 debate with President Jimmy Carter: There they go again.

There were, to be sure, no outrageous claims and there was no faux Irish jig at the lectern. But the evening was full of (predictable, polished and rehearsed) thrusts and parries, though they had the air of remarks intended more to impress and please the presidential nominees at the top of the ticket than to change minds in living rooms across the country.

Mr. Kaine: "Donald Trump can't start a Twitter war with Miss Universe without shooting himself in the foot."

Mr. Pence: "The campaign of Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine has been an avalanche of insults."

Then, in the last half hour, Mr. Pence derided what he called the "weak and feckless" leadership of Ms. Clinton – and Mr. Kaine suggested that Mr. Trump was a "maniac."

Exchange after exchange, the two sparred repeatedly (on ISIS, Iran, Russia, immigration and the economy, primarily), but broke no new ground, nor did they break from the nominees with whom they would serve. Like the presidential nominees' first confrontation, late last month, there was no mention of the social issues (marriage, gay rights) that were the leitmotif of earlier presidential elections.

In fact, only at the very end of a debate between two men reared in the Catholic Church (and who are devout Christians) was there even a touch of religiosity. Mr. Kaine spoke of his struggles over the death penalty, which he opposed – but as governor of Virginia imposed. Mr. Pence spoke of his "personal decision for Christ" and his opposition to abortion.

How much any of this mattered is anyone's guess, but an educated guess is that it mattered very little.

"Ordinarily the big tent of American presidential politics has a sideshow and that's the vice-presidential candidates," said Daniel M. Shea, a political scientist at Colby College in Maine. "This time there's little attention to that ring of the circus, and in fact the line of people who want to visit that part of the circus is very thin."

In a debate that had the tone of a colloquy of over-caffeinated accountants, the peripheral nature of the session had its ironies, mostly actuarial, given that the 2016 election is the oldest presidential matchup in American history. Ms. Clinton would be 69 on Inauguration Day; Mr. Trump almost 71.

One of these two men – Mr. Pence or Mr. Kaine – will be a heartbeat, or a stroke, or a raging case of pneumonia, from the presidency – and in truth eight presidents have died in office, four of them of natural causes. One of the leading books of the fall season is Joseph Lelyveld's His Final Battle, a masterly chronicle of the last months of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who ran for re-election in 1944 at age 63 amid the virtual certainty that he would not serve out his term. In the event he lived for two months and 23 days after his fourth inauguration.

Even so, running mates sometimes do have an effect on the outcome of the autumn election, and in a close race like this one, Mr. Pence or Mr. Kaine could have that effect.

In 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts likely would not have prevailed without Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson on the ticket; Mr. Johnson helped the Democrats win Texas and kept Southern Democrats who might have recoiled from the Kennedy style from rebelling.

The 1976 vice-presidential debate elevated Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota and provided an additional rationale for voters to choose former governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia. Then again, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska surely hurt the prospects of Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee in 2008.

"The vice-presidential candidate can only affect things at the margins," said Joel Goldstein, a St. Louis University law professor who is regarded as the leading American expert on the vice-presidency. "This time the two presidential nominees have such strong personalities that the only margin might be to have these vice-presidential nominees help persuade voters not to go for a third-party choice."

David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.