A small but important point for Democrats to notice about the Thursday’s debate was that the instant polls conducted by CBS, ABC and CNN played an important role in limiting the advantage that relentless message discipline gives the Bush campaign and the Republican party in manipulating media interpretation. Frequently, the near-robotic repetition of a few key sound bites by one Republican spokesperson after another forces the media to give these views half the overall coverage, regardless of how widely held or plausible such views actually are.

Last night, however, in the “Spin Ally” area where key campaign spokespeople met the press after the debate, something different happened. As Ryan Lizza described it in today’s New Republic Online:

“In Spin Alley last night, a weird dynamic takes place. Both sides start on almost equal footing, but as everyone shares note and impressions about Kerry's "control" or Bush's weird facial ticks, as the first wave of instant polls overwhelmingly crowning Kerry the winner roll in, as the pro-Kerry punditry on cable gets passed around, things shift. Kerry's surrogates start to seem more caffeinated and giddy, while Bush's sound defensive...Tad Devine, who lived through Al Gore's disastrous trio of debates in 2000, is bouncing up and down and shouting after an aide reads poll results off a blackberry. "CBS, two-hundred fence-sitters," he says, "forty-four Kerry, twenty-six Bush. ABC, forty-five Kerry, thirty-six Bush." Devine is ecstatic. "Ha! Killer!" he yells, head cocked, eyes bulging. "That's crushing. Crushing!"

A few minutes earlier, Karl Rove had tried to float the notion that "It was one of the president's better debate performances and one of Kerry's worst." But, in sharp contrast to other occasions, he couldn’t make it fly. As Lizza noted “Vince Morris of The New York Post stares at Rove and asks, "Can you say that with a straight face?"