U.S. President George W. Bush blinked.

It was the same panicky look he had while he sat in that other Florida classroom ... on Sept. 11, 2001.

Bush also rolled his eyes, smirked, wagged his finger, pursed his lips, lost his cool, interrupted his Democratic opponent John F. Kerry and was the first to break the rules in the 32-page "Memorandum of Understanding" governing last night's debate.

He fidgeted, he flailed, he flopped. But at least he didn't flip, steadfastly and resolutely staying stuck in his message groove: "The world is safer without Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction proliferation terrorist network hard work of leadership" stuff of the campaign stump.

The one expected word he avoid was nukular, er, nuclear.

Meanwhile, Kerry fudged a few facts himself, making it seem that $200 billion (U.S.) has already been spent in Iraq, which it hasn't, and that Osama bin Laden is still in Tora Bora just ripe for the picking by "the world's best trained troops."

He couldn't even get the so-called "Pottery Barn rule" ("You break it; you own it.") right, perhaps because a guy that rich doesn't shop there.

But Kerry's sins were relatively minor — and he hammered the president on bin Laden and his failures in foreign policy.

Which is why the punditocracy consensus in the immediate aftermath of the debate was clear: Kerry won the night, on both style and substance.

When even MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, a guy who clearly sets his anchor chair on the right, declares Kerry the victor, it's easy to imagine champagne corks popping over at the Democratic campaign headquarters.

But so what?

According to an NBC poll released yesterday, 41 per cent of Americans say the debates don't matter.

And, although the ratings won't be in until today, it's a safe bet that most Americans were not tuned in at all, or only caught a few minutes.

More important, the full spin cycle has yet to begin.

That's what people really watch.

You can bet that, all through the night, the campaign strategists, and especially Bush's "brain" Karl Rove, were plotting how to pull this one out of the hat for their boy.

On the liberal blog and websites last night, fears were that the Republicans would announce another terror alert or trot out a much-wanted Al Qaeda henchman they'd just captured.

Which is a tad conspirazoid — but not completely out of line with recent events.

That's the way it goes nowadays.

It's all about the message — and you can be sure we'll be seeing it massaged all though the weekend.

Consider that, right after one of the presidential bouts in 2000, the general sense was that Democratic contender Al Gore won the night.

But then, in the days following the debate, the media played and replayed his impatient sighs over Bush's lines about social security. By the time the pundits put the debate through the political whitewashing, Gore had lost.

As Adam Clymer, a former New York Times Washington correspondent who is now political director of the National Annenberg Election Survey, noted the other day, journalists have abandoned fact-checking for drama criticism, talking about "performance" rather than policy.

"The test for journalists," he wrote in the Times, " is whether they can appreciate the importance of the event and help voters make sense of what is said, checking the accuracy of claims about the past and the present and the plausibility of what is claimed for the future. It won't do to say, `We covered that in August.'"

The trick for the campaigns on the other hand is to manage expectations and perceptions. And so far, the press has been under their spell.

For the past few days, all we heard about from the Democrats was how "Bush has won every debate he's been in," and from the Republicans, "Kerry is an exceptional debater."

At the same time, they downplayed their own candidates to the point where if Kerry showed a sign of life or Bush showed a sign of intelligence, they would be judged as winners.

Last night, Kerry showed that life, marshalling the case against the war in Iraq in straightforward terms without any of the nuances and twists that open up rhetorical flanks through which the Republicans can shoot.

He looked cool, calm and, as others noted, with some reluctance, "presidential."

In contrast, Bush stumbled and stammered and laughed at inappropriate times.

And the only reason we saw that happen was because the networks broke rule 9.a.(v) — which states that "there will be no TV cut-aways to any candidate who is not responding to a question while another candidate is answering a question ..." — and gave us a split screen view of the debaters who were planted at their prescribed podiums set at a negotiated distance apart.

In fact, it wasn't so much a debate as it was a Q&A session led by PBS's Jim Lehrer, who zeroed in on Bush's weak points.

If some of the carping on the right-wing blogs last night spreads to the mainstream media — as it likely will — by tomorrow, the charges will be of liberal bias in the questions.

By Sunday, who knows what weapon of mass distraction will divert attention from Kerry's clear win?

Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.

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