"Tit for Tat on a Night Where Spin Is Master"

Michael Powell (Reporter's Notebook, NY Times):

Mark Penn, pollster and chief strategist to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, how special were your candidate’s last comments in this Texas debate? Were you touched?

Mr. Penn furrows his brow, his blue eyes going soft. “Oh, I got the impression it was a very emotional special moment,” he says in a soft voice. “I think clearly she is committed in a deep and thoughtful way. ...”

Now let’s clamber eight feet away through the news media pack to David Axelrod, the mustachioed chief strategist and pollster for the other fellow, Senator Barack Obama. David, what did you make of Mrs. Clinton’s emotional closing, when she said her personal travails were nothing compared with those of the American people?

“Oh, she made a very compelling close; she had a very nice line,” Mr. Axelrod says, then gives a practiced pause, the better for him to watch reporters’ eyebrows jump at the very notion that Mr. Obama’s man would compliment the other side. “Which was of course a line right out of a Bill Clinton campaign commercial in 1992. Now I don’t begrudge her that at all. ...”

Oh, of course not.

The spin room is one of the more peculiar of the institutions that grow like barnacles on the hull of the presidential debates. It is where reporters go after debates to be spun. The rooms lack surprise, and never, ever, under pain of campaign excommunication, does a spinner offer a counterintuitive thought.

Spinners are there to offer the thrust and flash of the saber. Crowding in are veteran retainers like Doug Hattaway, who has labored in corners of Clinton country for years, and newcomers, like young Josh Earnest of the Obama campaign, who talks of what a great, great pleasure it is to be back in Austin, where he went to college.

Their efforts at mustering a little outrage and partisan advantage are all the more impressive given that the debate itself was mostly a remarkably polite affair, a blur of my friend, my colleague. And that vitriolic charge about plagiarism? Pshaw.

The drama beforehand was about what candidate would emerge from the Clinton camp. To skewer or not to skewer; such an exquisite dilemma.

But Mrs. Clinton apparently resolved that debate this way: Give peace a chance. “I am honored to be here with Barack Obama. Absolutely honored.”

Mr. Obama gave her a glance that appeared half-friendly and half-wondering whether a sharp object was about to be inserted into a vital organ.

Long before the debate ended, the cut men of presidential politics, the campaign soldiers for Team Obama and Team Clinton, tap-tapped at their laptops, e-mailing the hundreds of reporters who sat in the cinder-block holding pen that passes for a newsroom during this debate.

This is attack by nick-and-cut. The first e-mail message clocks in at 20:28, postmarked from the Clinton camp. It’s a subtle reminder: “Obama flip-flop on Cuba.”

Fourteen minutes later comes the first Obama campaign response, calling into question Mrs. Clinton’s commitment to immigration reform. Some minutes later arrives a YouTube link, showing Mrs. Clinton borrowing phrases that sound more than a little like Barack Obama.

And so on and on. It has the intramural feel of a brother and sister in a pillow fight gone bad.

Debates have a Barnum & Bailey circus quality, the itinerant campaign village tossed up in a matter of days, the forest of television satellite towers, the wires running everywhere, the cops, the pancaked television anchors, even the fierce young men holding the ritual Ron Paul for President signs.

Everywhere, déjà vu. And inside, reporters report on reporters and cameramen film cameramen while the actual debate hall, where actual voters sit, is in another room, entirely off-limits to the slightly frenzied typists.

Still, once in a great while, a glimmer, just a ray, of candor intrudes. So the silver-haired Mr. Hattaway is served up a softball that dangles just so. Might this debate, with that nice close by Mrs. Clinton, prove decisive, or important, or at least not entirely and completely insignificant?

Mr. Hattaway shrugs. “I never bought into that; it’s about winning Texas and Ohio.”