Despite there being no tradition of hardship pay in journalism, I watched last week’s Republican gubernatorial debate in full, devoting two and a half hours in the hope that I might learn something.

Instead, I learned that seven old white guys can gather at an Old Orchard Beach country club and talk for 150 minutes without saying much of anything.

It brings me no pleasure to note that it could have been worse. If frontrunner Bobby Charles hadn’t dropped out, there might have been eight guys in the exercise. Charles skipped it, as best I could tell from his social media, to go to the White House to plead for help for his campaign.

I watched the snoozefest unfold thanks to a livestream from the Maine Wire, the right-wing media outlet that exists to help conservatives win elections, as its editor admitted at a recent GOP fundraiser.

Dov Sacks, an attorney who chairs the Common Sense for Maine PAC, which sponsored the debate, said at its start that Maine Democrats put the needs of “illegal aliens” ahead of communities he insisted were growing more dangerous by the day (so dangerous that Lewiston is ranked among the safest cities in the nation).

What do I really want from a Republican gubernatorial debate? I want to hear GOP hopefuls say that they aren’t going to fall in line with President Donald Trump. 

Isn’t there a Republican in this race in Maine willing to gamble that unaffiliated voters, who can now vote in the primaries, might elevate them above a field of MAGA appeasers?

No, it seems. Most members of the GOP do little these days but peddle conspiracy theories as they try to avoid talking about the wars and other failures of a Republican-held Congress and White House.

The seven Blaine House candidates did an admirable job of steering clear of the issues on which a majority of Mainers prefer the Democratic position to their own, abortion among them.

Instead, they adhered to the tried-and-true call for lower taxes and smaller government. They also said we needed more housing, better schools and cheaper health care. All worthy goals, if pursued with care.

Overall, they seemed to me like decent men. With that said, only two have the government chops to step smoothly into the job: state Sen. Jim Libby and former state Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason.

The rest are counting on voters to pick a newcomer as the party’s nominee in the June 9 primary. A few of those newcomers, though, came across well in the debate, including Ben Midgley and Owen McCarthy. I liked Robert Wessels, too, because he seemed like a normal guy.

The sharpest exchange — and the most interesting — came when David Jones confronted Mason with the claim his campaign was funded by out-of-state billionaires. 

“There’s a PAC that’s spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of their money to get you elected,” Jones told him. “How do we know that you won’t be beholden to those people?”

It’s a good question, which Mason answered, correctly and reasonably, by pointing out PAC spending isn’t in his control. He said the PAC’s funders are “among the biggest, most prolific Republican donors in the entire country. And I think it would be a huge mistake” to alienate them, since party loyalists should be “thrilled people like that want to invest in Maine.”

Mason rebuked Jones, who gets points for hustle if not for substance, as “all show, no go.”

That’s the problem with most of this boring field.