By now it’s clear that the breathlessly anticipated televised debates haven’t fundamentally altered the chemistry of the presidential race between President Bush and Senator Kerry.

Most polls before the debates showed Mr. Bush with a slim lead; most polls after the debates show him with a slightly slimmer lead. But if our most idealistic small-d democrats are right – if voters really do treat elections as a rational contest between competing ideas – then this isn’t the outcome we should have expected.

Like every other commentator who has girded himself with impregnable integrity and unimpeachable objectivity, I came away from each debate with the strong sense that Mr. Kerry won handily over Mr. Bush. Overnight polls suggested viewers might have agreed.

And there were a lot of viewers: more than 60 million for the first presidential debate, roughly 50 million for the next two.

Yet with a few minor adjustments, the status quo in public opinion remains basically unchanged. Puzzled, I decided to read transcripts of the debates in search of an answer to the all-important question: “Huh?”

Despite the inevitable repetition and long stretches where nothing much happens – presidential debates are a lot like soap operas in that way – reading the transcripts has many advantages over watching the actual performances.

It’s much quieter, for one thing. You can’t hear the president shouting. Mr. Bush’s curious lack of volume control was the chief distraction, stylistically, of the debates. He sounded like Howard Dean trying to work a cell phone in a bank vault.

Even his supporters couldn’t explain the Bush Bellow, though Steven Keller, a debate expert and professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, has the most plausible explanation.

“I think Bush’s handlers overprotected him,” he says.

Fresh from the campaign trail, where a good war whoop is highly appreciated, Bush failed to dial back when it came time for the debates. “He was still in rally mode,” Mr. Keller says, “and hadn’t made the transition to debate mode.”

There were other stylistic clues to the overprotected life Mr. Bush leads. His now-famous grimaces and smirks in the first debate were those of someone who’s unused to hearing criticism at close range. And he spoke in a kind of White House shorthand – referring, for example, to “supplementals” or the “A.Q. Khan network,” without further elaboration – that suggested an impatient man who seldom has to explain himself.

But is it possible that these stylistic distractions were only that – distractions?

“Mr. Bush’s presentation was so weak that it becomes the point of departure for evaluating him,” Mr. Keller says. “The easiest thing to look at is delivery, and when one candidate’s delivery is so far below expectations, as Bush’s was, you never get around to assessing the more substantial aspects of the debate.”

A more substantial assessment is exactly what an undistracted reading of the transcript allows, and on the page you find a Bush who was more orderly and pointed, and a Kerry who was less well-spoken, than this television-glazed viewer would have thought.

Indeed, there are several moments when the two candidates – the fluent Kerry and the bumbling Bush – seem to exchange roles. Mr. Kerry leaves several thoughts unfinished, as though his neural call-waiting system forced him to take a new call in mid-answer.

Once he started to describe pay-as-you-go budget rules: “If you were going to pass something in the Congress, you had to show where you are going to pay for it and how. President Bush has taken – he’s the only president in history to do this. He’s also the only president in 72 years to lose jobs – 1.6 million lost.”

Mr. Bush’s answers, meanwhile, often read as though they were actually formulated by someone with degrees from Yale and Harvard, as when he explained (finally) the Iraq war’s role in fighting global terror:

“A free Iraq will be an ally in the war on terror. A free Iraq will set a powerful example in a part of the world that is desperate for freedom. A free Iraq will help secure Israel. A free Iraq will reinforce the hopes and aspirations of reformers in places like Iran. A free Iraq is essential for the security of this country.”

It’s an idea that makes much more sense when it’s not delivered at pile-driver volume.

Needless to say, many of the impressions created by television viewing are confirmed by the transcripts, too. Mr. Bush in particular seems often to be operating on a tape loop, so that even the most irrelevant catchphrases – “it’s hard work”- constantly obtrude, as when he described comforting a war widow: “You know, it’s hard work to try to love her as best as I can.” Poor Mr. President.

Still, what the transcripts do show, in the cold light of words on paper, is a clash of views more or less coherently presented – debates almost worthy of a great democracy.

It is possible, in other words, that our more idealistic small-d democrats have been right all along: It is voters who really do see elections as rational contests of ideas, while our commentating class lingers over nonessential stylistic mannerisms.

And maybe that’s why, in subsequent polls, Bellowing Mr. Bush hasn’t suffered as badly as some of us would have thought.

Mr.Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.