Sometimes one gets a little tired of the echo-chamber of election anxiety, the fretful watching of the debates, the scrolling through tweets and Facebook postings to see what everyone else is thinking watching the debates, the brilliant little analyses by friends, the bits of cleverness, the instant polls. So it was sort of relaxing and informative to watch the foreign policy debate with my 9-year-old Violet, who is at that phase of life when she views the world entirely through the lens of Harry Potter.

It started in the last debate when she said of Mitt Romney, after hearing him talk for a few minutes: “He’s Umbridge!” And of course I saw exactly what she meant, the brittle, lacquered, self-satisfied smile of the ambitious Dark Arts professor and passionate ministry bureaucrat, Dolores Umbridge. The saccharine, almost-girlish chuckle. The proclamations she issues at Hogwarts, the self-important talk about “the ministry this” and “the ministry that.” The classes doomed to read out loud instead of learning the spells they desperately need. The moment where she makes Harry write lines into his own skin with a pen that draws real blood, all the while smiling that fake and brittle smile. Then of course there is her interest in Muggle Registration, and protecting “pureblood” wizards from the dilution and compromise of human blood.

Last night at the end of the debate, when Anne Romney came up onstage in her green-patterned, 1950s-style skirt, with her anxious expression and pained smile, Violet saw Petunia Dursley, that manic perversion of ’50s housewifery, meanly maternal, protective of the wrong people.

Of last night’s moderator, the sweet-seeming and dignified Bob Schieffer, she said, “Professor Slughorn,” which I thought was a little unfair. Schieffer seemed so civilized, so mannerly, so decent. Professor Slughorn is all those things, but also a little pompous, a little networky, a little hail-fellow-well-met. I did see how Schieffer was a bit bemused, like Slughorn, as if the modern world had taken a few confusing and unfortunate turns. And his attempts to control the debate, to keep the two candidates on the ostensible topic of foreign policy, were reminiscent of Slughorn’s efforts to keep the future Voldemort’s explorations into dark magic totally theoretical.