It was the giant armadillo versus the baby cougar. The split screen wreaked its havoc again on the Cheney/Edwards debate Tuesday night. If you’d been listening on the radio, Senator Edwards would have won by a pencil, but in a 90-minute, two-shot the gravitas gap was a problem. Vice President Cheney’s bullet head and nuanced basso anchored his thoughts to his words and filled out the frame of the screen, while beside him Mr. Edwards bobbed like a tethered balloon. All that gulping at that damn blue mug. All that endless scribbling on the yellow pad. What was he writing at such copious length? A symphony? A movie proposal? If Gwen Ifill had been his teacher she’d have been asking: “John,have you taken your Ritalin today?” The Cheney team was smart to decree the Vice Presidential debate had to happen from plush swivel chairs. The veep always operates from a rumbling crouch, but Mr. Edwards is not a guy who does well at sitting still. After a while, it came to seem a relief when one of the two, usually Mr. Cheney, would keep it brief and to the point without taking extra steps to strangle his adversary’s previous answer.

The best moment was Mr. Cheney’s appreciation of Mr. Edwards’s fuzzy statements about his gay daughter, Mary. Bless the veep for not launching into some schmaltzy Dr. Phil testimonial of his own.

By showing restraint, Mr. Cheney displayed a humanity and judgment that looked, well, presidential. Mr. Edwards did best when he bore down hard and fearlessly on the sacred cow of Mr. Cheney’s long record of service, which he repackaged as a chronicle of embarrassing votes, and when he refused to let go of the VP’s whopping untruth in the opening minutes that he had ever linked Saddam Hussein to 9/11.

Democrats in New York were under whelmed by Mr. Edwards, who they hoped, unrealistically, would administer a David Kelly-like lawyerly coup de grace. They wanted another crack high like the Kerry/Bush debate. Their man’s undisputed win in Miami gave them their cojones back and they wanted to feel that testosterone surge again.

Democrats need the affirmation of “winning” more than Republicans do. The Republican apparatus is so good at marginalizing Democrats as “out of the mainstream” that when things look dark they start to believe it themselves. If their candidate drops in the polls, they sit around making jokes about moving to Canada. They spend long, myopic hours at the computer pulling 3000-word, statistics-laden diatribes about President Bush off the web and e-mailing them around to a cast of thousands with “This says it all” in the subject line.

But if Mr. Edwards got a B from his own side the commentariat’s overall consensus was that it was close to a wash, and Democrats were pleased by the larger, more damning mystery that Mr. Cheney’s self-assurance reinforced for the electorate, namely, the contrasting shallowness and intellectual feebleness displayed in Miami by his boss, Mr. Bush.

That’s what’s so fascinating about the debates. They operate as media clearance, sometimes offering depths you hadn’t noticed, sometimes taking you back to where you started. The first debate was a thriller because it threw the perception game into a new round. Stripped out of the controlled arenas and leadership cameos crafted for him since 9/11,and contrasted now with the self-assurance of Mr. Cheney, Mr. Bush free-fell back into the old pit of seeming a simpleton up past his bedtime, while Mr. Cheney reclaimed the backstage president role the administration has taken pains to bury in the last year.

Senator Kerry, meanwhile, free from the barrage of flip-flop pentimento,

suddenly got himself a whiff of Mount Rushmore. It’s amazing what a little buzzer training will do. He will not just rebuild our alliances, restore respect blah blah wheeze wheeze; he WILL hunt down and KILL the terrorists. The former stick-in-the-wind was planted so firmly on the ground he seemed to grow out of the podium like an oak tree.

For Democrats, one nice corollary to Mr. Kerry’s success in Miami was that was it dispelled, for the moment at least, the sense of the president being aided by unbeatable voodoo. Karen Hughes, Mr. Bush’s human humvee, shifted into TV four-wheel-drive the minute the debate was over, talking about her boss’s “heart” and “great strength.” But there was a churning, disheveled edge to it. Karl Rove, who only hours before had been the unseen Merlin who controls the world, could be seen hanging around the emptying spin room under his placard like any other paid political flack.

Mr. Cheney has found a more primitive way to bluff with a bad hand. Bonding squatly with his armchair, he exuded what historian Simon Schama calls “the magical glue of doctrinal infallibility.” In a culture of blatherers, Mr. Cheney intimidates with his silences, his stingers, and, above all, his awesome capacity to stare down the evidence and assert that black is white.

This week we have seen three key players retreating from their own assertions about Iraq. One day before the veepbate, Donald Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations that there was no hard evidence of a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, saying with that debonair, crinkly smile of his that he couldn’t keep track of these migrating intelligence reports, only to recant hours later with a statement about being “regrettably misunderstood.” And just the morning of the debate it became known that former Ambassador Paul Bremer has been out on the dinner circuit excusing the chaos of postwar Iraq by declaring “we didn’t have enough troops on the ground” after the invasion to succeed, thereby contradicting his own party line on “Meet the Press” in July 2003.

Then there’s the increasingly hapless Condoleezza Rice. Confronted by the New York Times about her failure to tell us that her assertions about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capacity had already been debunked by experts, she explained it wasn’t up to her to “referee disputes in the intelligence community” – which is actually part of her job description as national security advisor.

Mr. Cheney, by contrast, is not retreating anywhere. Hulking, controlled, unrepentant, he’s the leading exponent of the power of the glower. Challenged by Ms. Ifill about Messrs. Rumsfeld’s and Bremers’s admissions, he insisted, “If I had it to recommend all over again I would recommend exactly the same course of action.”

Mr. Cheney doesn’t pass hot potatoes. He eats them, with plenty of sour cream.