"...he lies the way other people breathe..."

Nothing describes my initial impressions of the Veep debate better than that cogent description of Dick Cheney by Susan at Suburban Guerrilla. Give the man his due - he's a much smoother liar than his boss, so he makes a much better first impression.

As Ryan Lizza points out at Campaign Journal,

"Cheney just reminded us tonight how bad Bush was last Thursday, and the bar is now raised higher for the president in the next debate."

The punditocracy and a good deal of the blogosphere seems to be calling this one a tie, and at first blush I'm inclined to agree, but there are a couple of caveats to my judgement.

First, I'm a dedicated partisan, and as such, I'm hardly the target audience for these performances. I'm heartened, then, by the results of a CBS News poll of "a nationally representative sample" of 178 uncommitted voters. The outcome?

Forty-one percent of these uncommitted debate watchers said Edwards won the debate tonight. Twenty-eight percent said Cheney won. Thirty-one percent thought it was a tie.

And if Bob Novak thinks it's a tie, well, it's likely an Edwards win.

Between now and Friday, when attention will shift to yet another stunning debate victory by John Kerry, there will be more assessment and reasssessment of last night's debate, and I suspect that Digby is (once again) exactly on target.

I predict that once the full scope of the lies Cheney told tonight are artfully dribbled out by the Democrats over the next couple of days, Cheney's respectable "draw" will turn into a rout.

Of course, that won't happen by accident, and the wingnuts, having been overwhelmed by the Democratic response to the first Kerry/Bush debate, will be working overtime, so we've got to work even harder.

Get those cards, letters, on-line poll votes, phone calls and forum posts going, and keep 'em coming. Kicking Ass offers a pretty comprehensive list of potential targets for your grassroots spin. An hour or two invested today will pay media dividends tomorrow and even bigger dividends 27 days from now.