Again and again, Bush jumped on the end of Kerry's answers, asking Lehrer for time to respond, then found himself with nothing to say. The president sputtered, stared off into the distance -- invoking nothing more than that footage of him listening to "The Pet Goat" -- then inevitably returned to the riff he repeated all night long. In case you hadn't heard, Kerry changes his positions and sends "mixed messages."

And when Kerry turned the tables on Bush -- when he challenged him on Iraq or North Korea -- Bush seemed to have little to say beyond his first line of defense. The president seemed either unwilling or unable to deal with the tragedy of Iraq. On a day when 41 Iraqis were killed in car bombings -- 34 of them children getting candy from U.S. troops -- Bush said nothing at all about the suffering of the Iraqi people. He described Iraq in the way that some people talk of losing weight: "It's hard work."

It's really hard work, so hard that Bush used the phrase 11 times. And Bush said he understands it's hard. "I get the casualty reports every day," he said. "I see on the TV screens how hard it is." Bush seemed to save himself from the emotion-free zone a few minutes later, when he got choked up talking about his meeting with a woman who had lost her husband in Iraq. But then he bungled it with another "hard work" and a little Bushism to boot. "You know," he said, "it's hard work to try to love her as best as I can, knowing full well that the decision I made caused her loved one to be in harm's way."

But it wasn't Bush's stumbles that mattered Thursday night. Bush has bumbled and fumbled in a million other speeches and press conferences and interviews, and it hasn't done a thing to undercut his support with his half of the electorate. People -- some people -- even find it endearing.

What mattered Thursday was Kerry's performance. Kerry had the chance to share the stage with the president, and he had to look like he belonged there. Just before the debate, Kerry advisor Mike McCurry acknowledged that voters "don't put Kerry in the context right now of commander in chief." McCurry wrote it off to the "usual life cycle" of a presidential election, but it was more than that. Whether in the caricature the Republicans have drawn for him or in his own meandering style, Kerry had failed to come across as fully presidential. When he'd say something like, "When I'm president," it seemed, well, off.

In the run-up to the debate, it was unclear that Kerry would be able to change that. First, Matt Drudge and Lynne Cheney suggested that Kerry had taken on some kind of artificial orangey glow. Then, on "Good Morning America" Wednesday morning, Kerry flubbed a question he should have been ready to nail. Asked about his infamous "I actually voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it" comment, Kerry said he'd made it in "one of those inarticulate moments late in the evening when I was dead tired." Kerry was wrong; he'd made the comment early one afternoon.

And Thursday, the Kerry campaign managed to get into a spat over the timing lights. The two campaigns had agreed that the lights would be visible to the television audience; the Kerry campaign hadn't contemplated that they'd be mounted on the lecterns. In the view of reporters, Mike McCurry and a team of Kerry aides fought it out with a handful of Bush advisors. The lights stayed, and Kerry looked both hyper-technical and weak for raising the issue.

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