It seemed pretty obvious to me tonight's debate was for any person not already a Bush/GOP partisan a terrific performance by Kerry, and further evidence of GWB's almost tragic unfitness for high office. As I obviously have a deep-seated prejudice going into this, I wouldn't expect supposed neutrals and undecideds to weigh in quite so heavily pro-Kerry. But only those who have already bought the myth that Bush's pigheaded, shrill insistence on a black-and-white world of his own describing equals strength could have interpreted his blustery stumbling tonight to be evidence of competence. Even if you like Bush, you have to admit that in this forum, he sounds stupid, makes excuses, lies poorly, and is truly inarticulate much of the time.

The funhouse-mirror effect of telejournalism, in which shrill and pigheaded gets reflected back as fiery and tough went into effect on the post-debate "analysis" offered up for our edification by CNN's Blitzer, Greenfield & Co. While they offer a little pro-forma fact checking (making sure to challenge each candidate the same number of times), they are as usual only truly comfortable discussing their perception of what America's perception will be -- and that already-hazy subject is quickly rendered more amorphous by the constant turn toward the feelings produced by the candidates.

It's all the more sickening when one realizes how hard these people are working to disattach and discard what small portion of substance remains in the much-mediated circumstance of these highly-choreographed debates. Through the thicket of stagy conventions, preposterous limitations and relentlessly predictable phraseology, one can yet -- if dimly -- make out actual STUFF THE CANDIDATES ARE SAYING. It's as if, despite it all, these "words" which they are using, actually mean things: as if despite our marketer-trained minds, we can't help but notice that language is also a medium for communication and not merely an empty performance of evocative sound-forms. Hey! Kerry just made a commitment to a particular tax policy! Gosh, the President just made a critique of that policy. And look -- that critique was based on false premises! This language shit is amazing -- the words not only mean things, but we can investigate, test, even evaluate those meanings!

And then the analysis begins -- and those meanings, real-seeming though they might be, prove to be impossibly fugitive to rate among the concerns of the talking heads. What were the "themes" each candidate returned to? How "strong" did he seem? Did he seem more energetic or less so? These are the concerns we find ourselves deeply involved with. One of the CNN commentators (it might have been Carlos Watson) tonight suggested that in the case of this debate, the question of "who won" would not merely be decided by the public and reflected on the Sunday morning talk shows -- but in this case, presumably because it's Friday -- the Sunday morning shows would do much of the heavy lifting in picking a winner.

I don't know what more there is to say about that. Except that Joan Didion (see below) is certainly a better person to read on this subject than me. So I'll stop. But what I saw tonight was a clear Kerry victory instantly transformed, through the magic of low expectations, into a preposterous fantasy of a tie with the man he scored on time and again.