Before I get into my impressions of the debate, it's worth mentioning what they teach you when you get "press training". You don't so much look at the conversation as an attempt to convince the other side of your opinion. Instead, you look at the conversation as a negotiation over what your sound bites will be. You're supposed to have no more than three points, and if you get a question somewhere else, you try to connect the answer back to one of your three main points.

That said, my initial impression of the debate, before I watched any of the "spin" was that neither candidate won, but Kerry was at least trying to address the questions. Bush was clearly in "press" mode, giving many of the same answers repeatedly. Furthermore, Kerry did a resonable job of looking reasonable, keeping his cool, and speaking well. Bush lost his cool, had terrible body language, and clearly suffered brain-lock at several points before he dragged himself back onto one of his talking points.

Based on that, I can't say that Kerry "won", but on the signature issue where Bush is supposed to be kicking Kerry's butt, we instead saw Kerry holding his own and land a couple blows in the process.

Watching some of the post-debate "spin" made my head hurt. I'm not sure if it's funny or just sad watching the Republican partisans trying to make the case that Bush somehow did a good job in the debate. The "Daily Show with Jon Stewart" did a half-way reasonable job of skewering the whole debate process, and Saturday Night Live did an astonishingly funny opening parody of the debate. SNL's Kerry parody said "I've consistently had one position on Iraq" and then proceeded to give an amazingly convoluted answer. Likewise, the Kerry parody claimed he'd consistently said one thing to pro-war audiences and the opposite to anti-war audiences. "It's not flip-flopping, it's pandering." The Bush parody whined a lot about how hard it is being the president and criticized Kerry for things he never said. Very fun, and for SNL, it was quite unusual because it was far more biting and insightful than their usual shallow humor.