In case you haven't seen the earlier debates, the premise of Bauer's remark was to call Keyes to task for his apparent hypocrisy, since he had earlier chided McCain for jokingly praising a gangsta rap group on MTV. The only problem was that Bauer didn't seem to have noticed how Keyes responds to this sort of question, and Keyes responded with one of his classic combinations of hubris, adaptability and rhetorical flourish.

Blaming him for what music was playing was like "holding me responsible for the color of my skin," Keyes told Bauer. But wasn't it a bad example to set? Far from it. Keyes spun his turn in the mosh pit into a metaphor for his trust in the people (Get it? Keyes had to trust that they wouldn't drop him on his head). "And as an emblem of that trust," Keyes bellowed on, "I believe, it was the right thing to do."

But, Bauer asked, wasn't Keyes just reducing the debate to the level of the Jerry Springer show -- an atmosphere Keyes had earlier warned against? Keyes responded that on decamping from the mosh pit, a reporter told him he was the only person he'd ever seen come out of a mosh pit with his tie on straight. From this he launched into another metaphorical tear about how dignity comes not from the surface, but from within. Dignity "is about how you come through difficult times [i.e., his trip through the mosh pit] like we did in slavery."

The greatest testament to Keyes' prodigious skills as a debater is the great gulf between how ridiculous his responses seem in the retelling and how very impressive they seemed at the time he said them. It was an undeniable tour de force. Who would have thought that Keyes' dive into the mosh pit was a grand populist gesture? At the end of Keyes' tear, for the only time during the debate, the press gallery erupted into applause, in what amounted to a collective, "Wayne's World"-esque acclamation: "We are not worthy!"

The net effect of both debates, however, was to reinforce the direction in which each race was already moving -- in Al Gore's favor on the Democratic side, and slightly in John McCain's favor amongst the Republicans.

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